Sentences for Jiang Qing
1.
China's Last Lady
Jiang Qing
one of the gang
Mao's widow
his fourth wife
who never really
lived with him
after Liberation
in 1949
has outlived
herself
is ready to die
but life for her
goes on for her
in Qin Cheng
a prison not far
from Beijing
where she has
a room of her own
but not much
is left for her
not movies not
lovers not China
only rag dolls
she sews
for children
she never sees
knowing that
face in China
is self is pride
and saving it
a career
I wonder
if before she
sews the buttons
on for eyes
the smiling
mouth the nose
those dolls
she ever sees
a child's face
her own face
innocent
and confesses
all at once
her guilt
how without
intending to
she became
the Chairman's dog
when he told her
to bite she bit
and just
for a second
regretted it
all her country
men and women
hurt lost
gone dead
2.
Last Chapter and Verse
A woman of many callings...
Li Jin was her birth name,
'Used Shoe.' From her father,
a carpenter, she inherited
her proletarian feet.Li Yunhe, a man teacher
called her, 'Cloud Crane.'
She was young, tall, thin.An opera singer in Wuning,
she called herself
--for no known reason--
'Blue Apple,' Lan Ping.But it was Mao himself
who named her Jiang Qing,the night she came
like a line of Tang poetry,
a 'Lapis River,' bluer than blue,
into his Yanan cave.. . .
In the beginning was the end.
'Let me dissect myself before you,'
she once said, quoting Lu Xun.
But she never did.Not even in her last chapter
and verse she left behind
for Deng Xiaoping,
that 'little bottle' of a man.
That 'braggart king,'she called him
in the death note she wrote.
'Don't feel happy too soon.
You will not have a good death.'The only stones she had,
her words, she aimed at him.
Blaming him for everything,on May 14, in Qin Cheng,
China's Prison Number One,
with her own belt she hanged
herself...and felt,
for the first and last time,
beyond her need
'to turn grief into strength,'
the unbearable weight
of history, her heavy heart.