(Between February 2009 and 2014 131 ethnic Tibetans have self-immolated in and outside Tibet in protest against Chinese persecution, many leaving statements of intent. In 2012 an English Tibetan Buddhist in a French monastery followed them; personally known to the poet, he left no written note.)
I
Easy to count the numbers, all the way past one hundred and thirty,
not so much the names, or faces,
gone in fire.
23 years, a herdswoman, with a six-year old son
Father, being a Tibetan is so difficult.
We have no freedom at all…
A herdsman called Rechok
never gone to school
I am willing to take up the pain and
sufferings of all living beings.
If I fall at the hand of the
Communist Party of China, please don’t resist.
Sobha Rinpoche, in Delhi, when Hu Jintao paid a visit
Without freedom, we become a
candle flame in the wind
Student, 19 years, in a market square
No one deserves to live like this
24-year old, glasses, intellectual, a young Che, or Nelson, or Mohandas, says
It is my wish that the sun of happiness
may shine on the land of Tibet
Rikyo, 33, a mother of three
do not indulge in slaughtering and trading
of animals, do not steal,
Speak Tibetan, do not fight,
Bearing all sufferings of the sentient beings on myself,
Do not resist by fighting if I get into Chinese hands alive
we’ll never hear any more
from any of them, or any
of all the others,
in Chinese hands alive
& unresistant as we are.
II
Reams, now, have been written. Nothing
redressed. (Your shoes, I noticed first – ugly
fluoro runners taking up room on the dusty,
communal thresholds.) Couldn’t tolerate the
space of living you occupied, when to live
in that knowledge of the wound of others
was itself a worse one. Sole – soul – solar
Witness.
∞
The hi-fidelity silence that
follows, curves like space around a vacuum,
terrorises untruth, in the way a child’s
muteness returns the wager of worldly
adult pretence to its shoddy source. You
true naïf, to burn that world denial,
monstre sacré, to ash.
The last walk we took, to the village,
under a southern French sun, blood poppies
in full spate. La vieille sagesse in retirement,
tender with you, but gave me short shrift,
translating her savant archaisms into
plainer speech. As if she knew your
loyalty to fire already, could scent
singed skin and hair, the siren in the
distance. Neither of us spoke on the
return; kismet of some beckoning
in the road ahead.
They said you took a flag with you;
no-one told the journalists, the policiers
at the great doors, it was a Tibetan one.
Perhaps it had burnt with you, out of all
recognition. Only shroud-fragments left
for decipherment; no-one with the
faith for breaking that
genius code.
III
In Norway, and a Nobel Peace Prize awarded there
a quarter-century ago, turned away, now, from the corridors
of power, His Holiness the Dalai Lama says:
entirely depends on motivation. If such a drastic action
takes place with full anger, then negative.
But more compassionate, more calm mind,
then sometimes maybe less negative.
No-one questions the motivation of the
Chinese Communist Party, the Norwegian,
South African, Czech, Australian ministers and all
their soiled bedfellows who have shown him the door.
This the age of diplomacy whose furthest
refinement is to exchange sealed
prophylactics between heads-of-state
pretending protection from the mutual
infection that has already coupled
with tainted blood.
Easy to forget that
fire burns germs
kills off the worst
offenders.
You only have to be
tough enough
to eat its flames
without regret.
Entirely depends
on motivation.
whispered lineage 
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