Tibetan Antelope

by Gong Xuemin
     trs. by Fan Jinghua

Desperate horns, in running, leave scrapes
All over the bloated skin of the sky.
I am not to blame, as lead bullets have taken down the sky of my
family,
And now the sky is small like a snowflake.

I have to run fast to pull this piece of snowflake into a flag,
A white flag, to cover
The colorful carcasses exposed in the TV news.

The hair is thinning on my fur as the temperature rises,
And my heart cools only when I step upward.

My horns become lonely, too fragile to stay stable in the wind,
As one by one my rivals of the same blood have been gunned down.

My lungs are infected by the asthma of off-roaders,
And when I shiver
The grasslands become the scars I cough up and spit to the earth.

My name stays in the heart
Of people who no longer write with hands and it dies with each
stroke;
My name will be increasingly simplified until the entire plateau is
put in pens.

I can only make use of the thin air,
And thin down my name and put it in the textbook
As a vocabulary for the traversing trains.

I can only use shallow grasses to remind the bullet
I am a species of running herbivore,
Like the running of a bullet,
But the bullet won’t listen.  It thirsts for blood, for me and all the
creatures.
Inevitably, it will thirst for men who invented it.