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?
What depths of imagination will we plunder?
What memories will we dig from their graves?
What guilt awaits our every passion?
What promises will we break and make again?
What sorrows will we lay upon our hearts?
From what gutter won’t we gaze at the stars?
What regrets rush upon us from ahead?
What demons do we confront on the way?
What faith do we abandon by the road?
What angels of our nature do we slay?
What flesh do we willingly mortify?
In what night do our souls sicken and die?
What lies did we not commit to telling?
What violence did we weave into our desires?
What wounds did we open from our past?
What bruises did we leave upon our minds?
What pleasures did we dull by repetition?
To what evil did we condemn our actions?
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, is about none of these places.
A Communist in Hong Kong 