Re-Telling

For Annie, Grace, Jenny, and many others

By Damian Robin

She answers questions that her mind wants to distort,

The audience hears from her past where pain holds court,

Absorbed into her city, burning to the ground,

The flame’s not reached them yet– just smoke that has no sound:

This, her deep place, this her baptism of boils

Curling from a cooking pot where torture toils;

And she must live it through, remain there to its end –

She sees the crowd is poor, must give them this, not bend.

She pays them with her body’s ice, she’s nothing else.

They need to have, and this is it, her mismatched wealth.

These visions pierce the hall and anguish breaks her breath

But she must keep alive experience near death.

Once more she shares her gifts, truths given free of thought,

For their hearts need to know, and this is all she’s brought.

Oil painting "Determination under Persecution" by Xing Xin. This artwork portrays one of more than a hundred torture methods employed by the Chinese Communist Party in persecuting Falun Gong practitioners. .