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| The Taiwan Gazette |
228
by Albert Hwang
A pistol whistles / calling / an opening
a wild unsuturing / red nicotine firefly
red ring / and heavy hands / wringing
rending the white sun / undamning
screams into the earth and
breaking / the water / irrigating
voices that singed antennas
singing
saying "Here" to a million foreign ears asking
"Where?"
And no, not Liuqiu /
Taihoku / Zeelandia
And not the Republic
This / Taiwan 台灣 / the gathering place
the bend / split of the rock / made
of tectonic bodies of
the ungovernable / hands
raising / a place / rising
lifted from the sea.
The 228 Massacre: On February 28, 1947, agents of the new Chinese government in Taiwan pistol-whipped a woman for selling contraband cigarettes. An angry crowd confronted them and a protester was killed. This set off weeks of anti-government protests, during which the Taiwanese demanded civil rights and equal representation. Chinese Nationalist troops arrived in March and killed 28,000 people. 228 was a watershed event in the ongoing Taiwanese independence movement.
Albert Hwang is a Taiwanese American poet from Illinois. He is a James B. Reston New York Times Gold Key winner (Scholastic Arts & Writing) and a Betty L. Yu & Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize winner (TaiwaneseAmerican.org). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Inscape Journal, The Lake, Unbroken Journal, New Verse News and other publications.
