BY MARY PACIFICO CURTIS
Inspired by Ai Weiwei’s installation Straight?
grey mist over shadow mountains
landscapes mute in smog
blur of bicycles families of three
140 characters picture posts
unsigned
then roiling earth hurls rubble
plaster dust stucco bits broken brick
stone roof tile shards
water pooled at pipes rebar
scattered bodies
the children.
We must find them.
Excavation, aftershocks and tears
the waters’ soggy churn
fissures
on earth’s disordered crust
shattered trust
more silence
counting
but never naming
the dead.
The children must be named, Fǔbài must be made known.
Mallet and muscle applied to tons
uneven rebar pounded straight
- rusted rods
One for every child.
now stacked to model peaks and rolling hills,
a river gash and sunken plain.
Fluorescents flicker over the ballroom gallery,
printouts along high walls
stream names as living masses
shudder through in silence,
circling
the pounded, sentinel terrain
perfected by excavators
who reshaped twisted rebar,
into valleys and hillsides, rivers and plains
‘unyielding elegy
to undeniable remains.
Mary Pacifico Curtis is the author of Between Rooms and The White Tree Quartet, both chapbooks published by WordTech's Turning Point imprint, as well as poetry and prose that has appeared in The Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, The Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, LOST Magazine, Catamaran, and Calyx and in numerous anthologies. She was a 2012 Joy Harjo Poetry Finalist (Cutthroat Journal), 2019 Poetry Finalist in The Tiferet Journal, a non-fiction finalist in The 48th New Millenium Writings contest, and a 2020 poetry finalist in the Naugatuck River Review.
Process Note: An Ai Wei Wei exhibition at London's Royal Academy of the Arts moved me so deeply prompting me to make a study of the circumstances surrounding the Sichuan earthquake that killed 19,000 children - as well as the artist himself. AI Wei Wei has made a mission of exposing the corruption of public officials who accepted bribes and allowed the building of sub-code schools and other structures. Through this work and several others he has also exposed the governments efforts to conceal the names of the children who perished, in the process, bringing them to the entire world. I wanted my poem to take the reader to the scene of destruction, see the landscape and rubble, feel the pain and fear as families cried every time a body was found and not found in the digging through the rubble, and to feel the hushed silence as people filed through that gallery, many learning about the devastation for the first time like me.