The eyes always get you, those
faces staring
from supermarket posters, the
missing children
plucked off streets, vanished into
forced labor,
begging gangs, prostitution; some maimed,
some recovered, some gone
forever. Once,
on a train to Shenzhen, a teen
boy, dressed in rags,
one eye, half his chin missing, entered
our carriage,
hushing the chatter, singing like
an angel for coins,
and I mean like Bocelli, or
Pavarotti, our car filled
with ear-melting Italian opera,
rocking and swaying
through the Chinese countryside,
the closest we,
in our economy class hard seats,
would ever get
to La Scala, or the Bolshoi, if
we even knew what
those were, and the boy finished
to utter silence,
our open jaws and wet cheeks,
his good eye
scanning the crowd, and
for one second it rested
on me, this otherworldly eye,
this eye of the stricken
universe, and I am ashamed, but
I looked away, as
did the others, ruffling their
newspapers, pretending
it never happened, in that
uneasy air, before the boy
moved on to the next car and
beyond, to be lost
among the billions. No one
spoke, all of us
aware of the sticky business of
childhood in Asia,
knowing that the eye had seared itself
into us;
an open wound that would fester within for years.
~ Lauren Tivey
*This poem originally appeared in the debut issue of The Verse (August, 2013), which is now defunct. Editor Dan Navarrete wrote of the poem, "A call to take action, excellent depiction of the reality surrounding impoverished youth in China. Truly a piece that sinks into our hearts and refuses to let go, just like the imagery". Sorry to say The Verse didn't last, and the website's now gone. I was lucky to find a copy of this, hidden in my email files, as I'd lost the original in the expansion drive crash, and the only other copy was on the website which closed.
