The Unbearable Weight of Silence

by Doug Stone
  
After all these years when he walks across Tiananmen square,
the pavement still vibrates with the rhythmic rumble of idling tanks,
the quick, slick, metallic slide and click of machine guns cocking,
the murmur of fear swirling through the crowd like trapped water,
then the sound of gunfire and all those screams eating the air.
 
 That moment still quivers through his feet into his bones,
quickens the rhythm of his heart, his breath at a dead run,
stumbles, gasping until all the jagged sounds of that day
flat line into an unbearable silence too heavy to carry anymore.