Portside

Tiananmen Square
By Patrick Daly

1. The People in Fresco's Digest the News

They have their noses
in the hot dark story of coffee.
They have ordered eggs and bacon, the place is filled
with the warmth of coming food.  How to swallow
a bullet is not on the menu.  The sturdy man
on the front page, shaking a helmet in his fist and dirty
with what looks like oil running
off his face down his shirt – surely
what has happened to him can be washed off?
The page would be sodden, this would be a black place of weeping,
there’d be no pleasure in the hips of waitresses bringing
fresh orange juice and oatmeal, pancakes, waffles with whipped cream and 
     strawberries, iced tea, if a picture
could seize the mind and penetrate
at the pitch of the appetites.

Built of indestructible styrofoam, flesh of the flesh
of a billion takeout cartons, the Goddess of Democracy is trash.  Those who linked arms  
    to protect her,
and those who left peacefully as they came, hand-in-hand,
and those who stood in a long line across the road, waiting, while foot-soldiers 
    crouched between the tanks and took aim,
and those who then stepped up and stood in the same place,
we never imagined them dead.
We thought it was the old argument
between old people and young people, wresting ground
inch by inch as parents and children do.
We didn't guess the parents would kill their children.
It was a different kind of bargaining, Patrick Henry's kind. 
It was a claim on us.

Brave Chinese students, do not be insulted
by salaried hands in Palo Alto, turning
the page, leafing
in the classified ads. 
Frivolity is human, it smacks of happiness, Thomas Jefferson is to blame
for us, as he is for you.
The map of shed blood dissolves in the repetitions
of a machine that drops an orange a foot down
onto a gleaming plate and garrotes it and the juice runs out
and it grabs another and the person watching, free to pay attention
to what he likes
in the sweet-smelling pocket of time that is his,
is living the life you were looking toward
from that pure distance.  What you died for
is here

but there is nothing better anywhere
than what you were.

– And those who pulped the boy faces of soldiers with rocks and shoes
and those who burned them out of their tanks like wasps and pulled off their limbs?

2. Easy to Break, Difficult to Dispose of

The price of democracy and freedom is our life.  Can the Chinese people be proud of this?

Would you have hardened like them:
Li Peng and Deng Xiao Ping, evil old men
burning the bodies of their grandchildren
(to no avail, the stink will last
while there are people to breathe)?

Would you have softened like us?  Would you
have sat at the counter and stirred in sugar next time
they jammed the helmets on and stuffed their ears
and snuggled the sweating guns?

Would you have found a new way?
Night and morning on the news
you spoke your alien, evenly-diced sounds, familiar though
to that part of us
that never stops wishing to be mended.
We do not think of democracy as a goddess
but we took her for what it is to be whole
and spilt.  The taste hangs in the air.
Even the new way lost is less bitter
than the old foulness, the old sweetness.

Seeing the small is insight.
Yielding to force is strength.

If men are not afraid to die
It is of no avail to threaten them with death.

Walking along the marsh edge, turning this over,
while in the cord-grass a bird sang
its two bright notes
two dark notes
over and over,
I broke a stalk of anise
and the tart new smell burst out
more new than tart, more fresh than anything
but these lives offered
in the hope of freedom, and taken.

(Quotations in italics are from the Declaration of the Hunger Strikers, and the Tao, respectively.)

Patrick Daly works for a California software start-up and writes poetry and prose on his lunch hours. His poem Words was a 2015 poem of the year in the New Statesman (London). See
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/06/words-poem-patrick-daly &nb…; He has published in many magazines, most recently in Ekphrasis. His poem Tiananmen Square received honorable mention in the Pushcart Prizes, and his chapbook Playing with Fire won the Abby Niebauer Memorial Prize.