Labor Camp
About a Falun Gong practitioner’s experience of Re-education Through Labor
By Damian Robin
Dragged up and down a corridor in secret years ago,
Her sticky prison clothes smelt rank, a stench too vast to know;
Her toilet trips too scant to wash, they shrank her dignity;
She stank the same as ev’ryone who trod that torture show.
Labor keeps you company but not if you can’t sleep;
Nor if your skin’s electrocuted when your lids weigh deep;
Nor if your nerves are stimulated ‘til your eyes don’t see;
Nor if your sense of self diminisheswhere insects creep.
And she relives these haggard times with mental bows each day,
Like kneeling, raising meal bowls up above her matted hair
To grab a daily bite to help assuage exhaustion’s stare.
Time’s distance does not heal, it does not put the past away;
Especially when she tells her truth to anyone who’s there;
Especially as the truth she tells makes souls wake up, aware.
Over 5,000 practitioners and supporters of Falun Gong from over 30 countries march in a parade in San Francisco on Oct. 22, 2016, bringing awareness to the practice and calling an end to the persecution in China that started on July 20, 1999. (Benjamin Chasteen/Epoch Times)
