The Statue of Feeling.

Xiang, Huang

The Statue of Feeling

 A hand turns me around
 A chisel and a pick keep knocking and hitting me.
 "Don't you try to hide in the rock, come out!"
 I tremble. Grooves swirl around me;
 The chisel and the pick unsettle me.
 Gradually a giant head emerges,
 Followed by a pair of motionless eyes,
 A nose, and two voiceless lips of a tolerant man.
 The chisel and the pick have excavated me from the depth of a
 fossil bed.
 I lower my head, my body prostrating.
 My back reveals the obscure ancient inscriptions that no
 generation
 Has been able to decipher.
 Like squirming worms, a group of men climb up the wasteland
 Of my prominent forehead.
 "Who is this?"
 A voice asks, frightened by my scorching silence.

 1982

Huang Xiang was born in Hunan Province, China, in 1941. He began writing poetry in the 1950s and has been imprisoned repeatedly for his work. In 1978 he founded "Enlightenment," the first underground writers' society, and started a literary magazine under the same name. In exile in the United States since 1997, he has been a resident poet in Pittsburgh under the PEN Cities of Asylum program for writers and currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and son. Huang's Out of Communist China, a bilingual anthology, was published in 2003, and a new selection of his poems, A Lifetime Is a Promise to Keep, will be published in spring 2008. As a juror for the 2008 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, he nominated Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser for the award.