Tiananmen Square, 1989
there are stars in their caps, soldiers
crouched as if the revolution
only walks at knee level. before them, a sea
of students: one adjusting his glasses, his face
turned towards some invisible turmoil,
this refusal that could bring everything
tomorrow or simply life. or simply
bullets slicing the Square, shouts
& fears running & running into bodies
that ripple
onto concrete
like children
napping under Beijing sun,
eyelids still as peace— still
as red pooling, as ink
resisting its meaning— resisting
the fist of a government crushing ambitions
into pennies
while a single protestor, white
shirt tucked in like my father
wears to church, stands
before a tank
the way one stands
before god:
where it moves, he moves.
where he stands, it stops.
man & machine dancing,
carrier bag swinging from his left
hand, the other one raised as if
he were hailing a cab, having just
purchased books for the semester, a pack
of calligraphy paper & an album
by John Denver, who my immigrant father
first heard in China in 1979, Denver’s twang
blaring across campus, in the halls, on the streets, ringing
through every child’s freedom dream—
so almost-heaven that my father,
upon hearing the news, eats
his oatmeal in silence, watches
the spoon’s craters disappear
into mush and the clouds
that float over Arizona
desert, how they divide light
from the road.
Copyright © 2024 by Marisa Lin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 16, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem emerged from my desire to understand my family’s relationship with collective resistance. While rummaging through my parents’ basement two winters ago, I came across a photo of my father, an international graduate student at Arizona State University, marching in protest of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. There he was, walking down the dusty pavement, just as ‘Tank Man’ stood on a multilane highway, just as John Denver sang to the country roads that would take him home. From Chinese, tian1an1men2 can be translated as ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace.’ Home, heaven, country, resistance: these are the dreams that bind us.”
—Marisa Lin
Marisa Lin
