Thirty years from Tiananmen

Ti-Anna, Tiananmen Square
Fatherless, freedom-less
Our lives are not massacres
They are privileges

For whatever language we speak
We know the pain of loss and
The burden of duty, calling us, in a thousand ways
I, don’t have the heart to understand

Some things, about this divided world
That rules in treachery, in forfeit, in slavery
We are the children of a mile end of destiny
It reaches out to us, like the warm mist

Of Taiwan, or the valleys of farmlands of China
But we are not those places anymore
We have defined geography and hope
In new ways, with humility and the burden

We are not fanatics, who can be
Absent from our own families
We still must live, we still must love
Not only an ideal or a place or a privilege
But ourselves, the way that makes us most human.

 

http://www.cbc.ca/firsthand/episodes/inside-these-walls

 

Ti-Anna Wang

There is a daughter who speaks about her father
As democracy once spoke for the people

Who are not deficient
They are not absent from their freedom

We live for purposes
And dreams like Chinese democracy

We were not born this way
We were moved by the world

To speak about injustice, human rights violations
We witnessed sacrifices for unspeakable courage

We are not martyrs, we are still fathers
Though imprisoned we dwindle in time

That spirit lives on like 1989
Whispers that China will shed One-State party rule

Warnings that the U.S. will reinvent tyranny
We are from both worlds, hospitable and ruthless

Male and female, politics is in everything
There’s no escaping corruption, revolution

Law, and the will for freedom is a will to power
And freedom is never free from inequality

There is no promised land of perfection
Only rudimentary ideas of what should be

There is a daughter who speaks of justice
And I cry for all the ways which we are
Enslaved, imprisoned, not free.

Ti-Anna, you are not a dissident
You are the heir to the new world
And it speaks Mandarin, and it’s free
Free in a patriotism of being global citizens

Free in the hope that our lineage leads
To a place where there are no dissidents
There is no abandonment, only people
Living and loving the only way they know how.

Silver T e a r in your P a l m

Silver T e a r in your P a l m

I can’t remember the tale
Of your sacrifice, I’ve seen
So much tragedy in history
That before the story ended

I turned away, aware, preferring
The fables we tell ourselves
Stories recited by grandparents
Felt more believable

I had held your palm
With splinters of revolutions
Most did not do anything
To bring the times forward

I recalled how you let your hands be held
As if our little measures of
Tenderness, could save us
But we knew what was coming

It’s hard to remember the future
But we could feel it in our bones
It was extinction or change
And there were moments like that

In evolution, they would arrive
At our door pivotal and in those
Circumstances, our destinies seem
Made and sung by other actors

Our Wills bend to the times
The predictive analytics told us
All we needed to know, those
Algorithms didn’t fail, had no error

So I did what a young person does
When he’s given an opportunity
To show how mature he has become
I kissed you, as if there was no tomorrow.