Tiananmen Square is a clean place today. Everything is swept before it can ***** in the history of place.
No sign exists of the tanks that rolled, the man in front of them, the blood that flowed like red sorghum seeds.
The cracked bricks have been replaced with new tera cotta tiles.
The first memorial plaque is invisible until you are standing on top of it, located at the Great Court at the University of Queensland 4500 miles away.
IN MEMORY OF THOSE WHO DIED IN TIENAMEN SQUARE IN JUNE 1989, its three lines read, using the Aussie spelling.
In San Francisco a 9.5 foot statue modeled after the original Goddess of Democracy is located at the edges of Chinatown in a park of concrete and manicured trees.
On the anniversary Chinese police put out temporary signs in in the center of the Square warning DO NOT LAY MOURNING WREATHS.
Banner displayers, victory gesturers, those doing solitary hunger strikes, are detained, questioned, disappear.
On the Party web the students are scrubbed. The only sign of blood that lingered in the summer air that June morning is a photo of the lone soldier who died in the “counter revolutionary turmoil”.
The plugged in young are unaware. They only know that the Party reserves the right of your total erasure.
Just as the memories of Hiroshima/Nagasaki are vanishing horrors in the Japanese soul, Tiananmen is not worthy of ghostly echoes, or even the lies printed in every official history.
Truth is the secret kept dark by the victors, it’s locked in prisons and dark closets, it speaks with the voice of exile
In the dark light and smoggy air, only dogs and the grieving blind know the true scent of Tiananmen hidden under the shiny tera cotta.