1

Monument waves of weeping
marble grain fused with blood-stained veins
Belief and youth beaten beneath
a tank's rust-chained treads
Ancient story of the East
leaks out new hope unexpectedly 

The glorious crowds have little by little disappeared
like a river that slowly, steadily dries away
landscape on both shores transformed to stone
Every throat has been strangled by fear, every
trembling has traced the dissipated niter smoke
Only the executioner's steel
helmet glints, luminous glints

2

I cannot recognize the flag anymore
The flag like an unknowing child
who's flung upon Mother's corpse
returns home weeping
I cannot tell day from night anymore
Time has been petrified by gunshots
like a paralytic without memory
Gun's muzzle presses into my back
I've lost my passport and identity card
In the bayonet-inflamed dawn
that once familiar world
cannot find a handful of dirt
to bury itself in
Naked red heart
collides with iron and steel
Earth without water without greenness
ravaged by sunlight

3

They wait and wait
wait for time to invent an exquisite lie
wait for the transformation of the bestial hour
Indeed, wait until
fingers transform to sharpened claws
eyes transform to a gun's mouth
feet transform to chained treads
air transforms to a command
It arrives
at last it arrives
the five-thousand-year awaited command
Open fire-kill people
kill people-open fire
Peaceful petition, hands unarmed
an old man's cane, a child's torn jacket
The executioner will never be swayed
Eyes burnt to red
Gun-barrels shot to red
Hands dyed red
A bullet
A mud-thick secret spills out
A crime
A kind of heroic feat
How relaxing
death's arrival
How easy
bestial desires are satisfied
Young soldiers
recently clothed in uniform
still haven't felt
the intoxication of a girl's kiss
but now in an instant
experience the bloodthirsty pleasure
of murder, their youth's beginnings
They who
cannot see the blood-soaked dress
cannot hear the struggle's scream
through steel helmets cannot perceive life's fragility
They aren't aware
of the fatuous old man
transforming the ancient capital
into another zone of Auschwitz
Brutality, iniquity rise up from the earth
like the splendor of a pyramid
while life crumbles into the abyss
where even the faintest echo cannot be heard
The massacre has engraved a nation's tradition
years, months as remote as an abandoned language
that enacts a final farewell

4

I had imagined being there beneath sunlight
with the procession of martyrs
using just the one thin bone
to uphold a true conviction
And yet, the heavenly void
will not plate the sacrificed in gold
A pack of wolves well-fed full of corpses
celebrate in the warm noon air
aflood with joy
Faraway place
I've exiled my life to
this place without sun
to flee the era of Christ's birth
I cannot face the blinding vision on the cross
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I've drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring's
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowe
Deep in the night, empty road
I'm biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I'm handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere
A blink, a trembling instant passes
to a flash of awareness: I'm still alive
On Central Television News
my name's changed to "arrested black-hand"
though those nameless white bones of the dead
still stand in the forgetting
I'm lifted up high by the self-invented lie
tell everyone how I've experienced death
so that "black-hand" becomes a hero's medal of honor
Even if I know
death's a mysterious unknown
being alive, there's no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I'm still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares

Besides a lie
I own nothing 

Liu Xiaobo

June Fourth Elegies: Experiencing Death

Qincheng Prison June 1990

First anniversary offering for 6/4