For Kiang Kang-Hu, Who Died In Prison In 1954 Poem by Dennis Ryan

March 3,2001

Note:Kiang Kang-hu and Witter Bynner translated the poetry of T'ang Dynasty Chinese poets into English, and completed a translation of the Tao Te Ching (The Book of Changes) , published in 1944.

谁记得在一个战争世界里的学者？
"Who remembers the scholar in a world at war? "
- Lu Lun (739-799 A.D.) , T'ang Dynasty poet

When I first read about you in another man's book,
I felt an unfathomable emptiness inside, and still do.
I wondered about your crime, what it was, still do,
but know It wasn't without asking you.You acted
according to conscience, suffered the consequences.
You lost your later years in the silence of a prison cell
over one thousand years ago, Lo Ping-wang felt your loss,
and if we listen carefully enough, can still hear his cries
issue across the centuries: Is anyone listening anymore?

We are listening intently as the royal ghost pines in the city
of Nanking, as the ten thousand feet of iron chain are sunk
to the bottom of the sea, and as the flag of surrender
Iihoisted above the fortress wall.We're listening still
as six of your countrymen have been confined today
for espionage while visiting relatives in your homeland.
Is such fraud, hypocrisy, the way of life everywhere?
Kiang Kang-hu, you were not merely a man of letters.
You showed us the way to live, give by example:
yours was the ultimate humility.
Death cannot dispossess you.

Even now I can hear your gentle breathing,
your voice in the prison cell patiently repeating,
"A sound man's heart is not shut within itself
But is open to other people's hearts...
I feel the heart-beats of others above my own
If I am enough of a..." You were more than enough
though you died undistinguished among the fleas, lice
and flies that cohabited that Shanghai cell.Who will translate
the Tao Te Ching for you now?How will they translate you
to this petty, fickle world?Your loss is more than mere words can...

I have learned that the world is a vast and empty place,
so empty that words such as "holy" and "sacred" can find
little home here.And yet, out of the void, steps a person
like you!How to explain this?Kiang Kang-hu, this is funny:
I sometimes feel America is as foreign to me as it was
to youwho never set foot here, and I miss you like a brother,
like the brother who scaled the mountain slope alone
on festival day carrying his lone branch of dogwood flowers.
What happened to Wang Wei's branch?
If you find it, tender it to me.