I Believe.

Xiang, Huang

I Believe

 They say
 Even with the most powerful telescope
 They cannot find me
 In the black hole in the galaxy
 "Poet, are you dead?
 Where is your tomb of stars
 Hung upside down?"

 No

 I
 Shine in my nakedness
 Right here
 Golden
 Melancholy
 Beautiful
 I am only sleeping
 In the blazing light of crimson lips
 (For the thousandth time I touch them
 Like the southern sun)
 In the gently weeping rain
 In the lulling waves
 Of rocking arms
 I have fallen asleep

 They say
 There is something
 Beyond the solar system
 A vacuum of space
 Infinity of time
 It will never disintegrate
 Or crash to pieces

 I never lie
 I know it is
 Me calling out
 It is something I once said
 To the young woman I loved
 Something that will never
 Disappear from dreams-" I--be--lieve--"

 1983

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.