Wind is mouthing something in my mortised ear:
June
June stays blacklisted
while I hasten my disappearance
Please attend to the method of bidding
farewell
the audible respiration attached
to big words
Please attend to the interpretations of not-us:
plastic flowers blooming like umbrellas
on the open horizon or the left bank
of the dead
The great concrete square is extended
through writing
as in this moment
where my written characters take flight
where dawn is forged somewhere else
and a flag shrouds the sea
as ocean and her faithful bass speakers announce
June
Notes on this poem
Appearing in June 2019 at the beginning of mass protests in Hong Kong against the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill, Bei Dao’s ‘June’ captures the uncanny mood of a city in flux as the wind changes its direction seasonally and politically in 2019 in Hong Kong, as well as 30 years ago in Beijing. Summoning the invisible atmospheric force, the poem speaks, as if through a reported or borrowed speech from the wind, in an unashamedly direct tone akin to legal or political diction. However, line by line the directness is interrupted by flashes of emblematic images that evoke an urban cityscape in crisis (‘the great concrete square’, ‘the left bank | of the dead’). The poem connects time, geography, and the act of writing and flight in an unpredictably palpable way, forging a high-pitched counter- balance between the questions of nationhood (‘a flag’), fluidity (‘the sea’), and coverage (‘bass speakers’) in a particular month of the year burdened with memory.
