The Meadow 99 Poland, in Nicaragua, in China—they know this image well. It is the outline of the man who would be king. If I go back further to read the ancient Chinese poets, they were also witness to the emperor’s excess, which often put them at odds with the state. And I have no doubt these same poets would be at odds with our oligarch were they alive today. We have learned to live in silence and that is a sorrow of this time. It is also a trademark of the oligarchy—public expression of truth goes underground. Ask the Polish poets Czeslaw Milosz or Wislawa Szymborska what they said when the oligarchs pushed their faces into obscurity. Ask the contemporary Chinese poet, Bei Dao, what he said when he fled for his life, or my late friend, Stephen Shu-Ning Liu, when he similarly fled his home on the Yangtze. Their words were staccato songs of living with oligarchs. They had to bury them in code, semi-secret transcriptions of fear. They were worried someone might find them and erase them. Then I think of Fadhil Al-Azzwi who fled Iraq after four years of torture from the oligarch. He has no illusions about what the oligarchs do or say because innocence is not part of the homeland. Listen to him parrot the throne: Nobody cares for others because there is no proof of anything. What is positive is also negative like every hope, like every doubt. The sound of innocence will return when the oligarchs are gone. There will be a place for poems of joy and love and celebration. There will be something like feeling again. And the virus will not know or care who is in power. But the fact of its virulence will no longer be debated when the oligarchs are gone. I will next imagine a border where people are not the enemy
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