“Shatter the Glass Wall”:
To honor Wei Jing-Sheng

Dateline: 11/25/97

It's hard to find the news in poetry, as William Carlos Williams said, but Russell Leong saw it in the arrival in the US of Chinese dissident Wei Jing-sheng. We're proud to print this headline rhyme -- poet reporters, keep us up to date with the words that are the news behind of and in front of the news!

--Bob Holman

Shatter the Glass Wall:
To honor Wei Jing-Sheng

1979.
Wei Jing-sheng
Your body is imprisoned
But your mind shatters the glass wall.
Whirling in thought and action
Your letters splinter the glass eyes of rulers.
Ironically, your smile
Frames the faces of the guards you disdain
Who stare at you from behind
The other side of the glass wall.

You pay dearly for daring
To cover the Democracy Wall
With your crowded cursive characters.
Yet you dare to write again
Composing yet another letter
To Deng Xiaopeng, then shifting
The weight of your fingers
To write to your lover Ping Ni
In the chilly autumn night.

Your sharp eyes and ears
See and hear who is murmuring
Impaled beyond the prison walls
Of Qinghai, Beijing, China.
They too are unquelled voices of History.

1989. Tiananmen.
You breathe the best blood of students
That bathes the vast gray concrete
With the river of rebellion
And vow to outlast your warden
Little Deng.

Another tooth falls out.
Another blister appears around your waist.
Another knot stiffens your fingers
But not your burning will.
Eighteen years of imprisonment
Irregularly pumps blood
Through your constant heart.

1997. November.
In the belly of the steel bird
You cross the International Dateline.
Stranded in time, suspended
In the middle of space
You dangle
Between two zones of exile.
Each exhale exits the window
A minute of the past.
Each inhale revives hope
A minute of the future.
May the future bring you home one day.

From the sidelines, I write
As a Chinese born in America
Three generations here, far
Removed from China and you.
We are both forty-seven years old
That's all we have in common.

But I must write you today
To honor those who have courage
And even for those who have not.
I write simply to give thanks to you.
To your comrades
And to lovers of freedom
Wherever you may live--
Asia, Africa, the Americas.

Become visible
Shatter the glass wall!

16 November 1997

Russell Leong

Russell Leong is editor of Amerasia Journal at UCLA. You can read his poem at The United States of Poetry Web site.

His books are available online from Borders.com:

• Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience (Routledge, 1995), edited & with a foreword by Russell Leong
• Country of Dreams and Dust (University of New Mexico Press, 1994), poems by Russell Leong
• On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast (Anchor Books, 1995), foreword by Russell Leong

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