What labours must we endure to get there?
What effort of muscle and will to arrive?
What pains must we suffer under its whip?
What concentration of thought and mind?
What dust and blood were we forced to swallow?
In what dirt and mud must we struggle?
As we walk to the horizon
What depths of imagination did we plunder?
What memories did we dig from their graves?
What guilt awaits our every passion?
What promises did we break and make again?
What sorrows did we lay upon our hearts?
From what gutter did we gaze at the stars?
Before we reach the horizon
What regrets rush upon us from ahead?
What demons will confront us on the way?
What faith will we abandon by the road?
What angels of our nature will we slay?
What flesh will we willingly mortify?
In what night will our souls sicken and die?
When all horizons disappear
What lies do we not commit to telling?
What violence do we weave into our desires?
What wounds do we open from our past?
What bruises do we leave upon our minds?
What pleasures do we dull by repetition?
To what evil do we condemn our actions?
In this place with no horizon
What hate have we written into our fate?
What love have we burned upon the altar?
What truths have we silenced on our tongues?
What hopes have we banished from our future?
What stains have we left on heaven’s brow?
In what hell have we burned forever?
— Hong Kong, June 2025
• • • • •
Lost Horizon (1933), the novel by the English writer, James Hilton, is the origin of Shangri-La, a fictional utopia located somewhere in the Kunlun Mountains on the northern edge of the Himalayan Plateau. Various places have been identified or acclaimed as Hilton’s inspiration, including in Kashmir and Tibet, with China having two. We visited the one in Yunnan Province in the summer of 2025. My poem, however, written before our trip, is about none of these places.
A Communist in Hong Kong 