Hu Xudong: A group of Astro Boys took off again in the smog, looking for you in a note

On the afternoon of August 22, the poet Hu Xudong passed away.

The self-media scrambled to mourn. In addition to "Poet Hu Xudong", there were also "Scholar Hu Xudong" and "Associate Professor Hu Xudong of Peking University School of Foreign Languages", they didn't seem to be talking about the same person. Thanks to them, too, I learned that, in addition to the poet, he was also a scholar and an associate professor.

The poet flies away. This is the first message I read on Monday morning. Immediately afterwards, his poems were scattered like a goddess scattered flowers, as if everyone he knew were reading them, and there had never been more of them than now. It almost made me mistakenly think that this is still an era of poetry.

how so. The first time I read about Hu Xudong was on December 30, 2020, the anniversary of Ma Yan's death. It was an old poem, "January 1, 2011, to Ma Yan", which recorded the funeral on that day.

At the beginning of the poem, "the bright moon rises out of the Tianshan Mountains and the vast sea of clouds" is like a secret sentence, which is captivating. Later, I read Ma Yan's "Letter from Winter" and wrote to Ma Hua:

 In summer nights, I often walk there alone, and I can't think of you in the dark.
"The bright moon rises out of the Tianshan Mountains, and the vast sea of clouds",
This is peaceful, and has the strength to stretch out his arms against the void. There is a long and empty winter between you and me. in my absence,
You chop wood, water the vegetable field, and organize the diary from a month ago. when you're not there,
I read Gide over and over again with cold fingers,
Facing the dusty desk in a daze.
Are those steep mountains like us in the cold, dry air, calm and not painful?

It turns out that this secret language actually came from here. At that time, Ma Hua had already arrived in Yunnan to teach in Diqing. Ma Yan remembered him and wrote this poem. However, in the summer of the following year, which was also a Sunday, Ma Hua took the colored chalks he bought for his students and disappeared into the torrent of the Lancang River. Later, Ma Yan wrote "Letter from Summer", still to Ma Hua:

 When the cold river washes over you, there is a person who keeps writing to you, and when the wind blows, he writes to you.

The letter will still be written the same, but this time it's a real goodbye. Then six years later, mutual friend Hu Xudong sent Ma Yan away again, and wrote again in the commemorative poem: The bright moon is out of the Tianshan Mountains, and the vast sea of clouds is in the sky. It was the first song I read, "January 1, 2011, To Ma Yan".

Now, it has been eleven years since Ma Yan left. Unexpectedly, at the end of this summer, the news of Hu Xudong's passing was shocked.

Walking that evening, the weather was bad and gloomy. I looked up at the sky, and the poem couldn't stop popping up in my mind: The bright moon is out of the Tianshan Mountains, and the vast sea of clouds is in the sky.

The bright moon rises out of the Tianshan Mountains, among the vast sea of clouds.

The bright moon rises out of the Tianshan Mountains, among the vast sea of clouds.

The bright moon rises out of the Tianshan Mountains, among the vast sea of clouds.

...

I don't know who will put this sentence in their own poems today, and send him away like he used to send away his old friend ten years ago. Only in poetry can I imagine the days when they were still alive.

In this lonely, lonely summer day, time also changed its flight trajectory, flying in the opposite direction: it was 2016, the sixth anniversary of Ma Yan's death, Hu Xudong wrote:

 For six years, this day has been soil, osmium, gardenia, and scorpion,
It's the swarms of Astro Boys taking off again in the smog, looking for you in a note.

In this way, I hope he really grows Chinese wings and poetry wings, and flies to "a note" to find his old people, and it is expected that Ma Yan and Ma Hua must be among them.

When I read "Writing to Friends Who Disappeared on the Road of Writing Poems", I also felt extraordinarily desolate.

 Our poems are bound together on lightning, but our people are scattered in the world, without sound.

He was only thirty years old at the time, how young, and how unbridled his poetry was. He expected the scene of "scattering the world": "Some are officials and stable. Some are cunning in business, some are lubricating their dry lower body for the media industry, and some are holding advertising steel whips to pump their wealth. plug". It's a disappointing world, and it will be fulfilled today. And "no sound" actually points to the death of the two friends like a prophecy. But I think either way, these people are lucky. "Wherever you are/ are the luckiest people", those poems have been written, let them "golden orchid on lightning", okay?

And we who read poetry are always looking for dead people to be friends with. If you don't write poems, you won't have the chance to make friendship with their Jinlan on the lightning.

Since that day, people have started to commemorate Hu Xudong, no matter whether he really loves poetry or not, but they have read a few lines, even if it is not too late to read it today. However, I always feel that most of them are Hu's students, or they have had a relationship with each other. Most of the small commemorative texts describe how moving and unforgettable this aspect is. But no one writes poetry. Yes, no one wrote poetry, and no one thoughtfully put "the bright moon out of the Tianshan Mountains and the vast sea of clouds" into their own poems to mourn him.

I have already read one volume of Ma Yan, and I have also read more than ten of Hu Xudong. Only Ma Hua, he left too early, and I don't know anything about him. Just thinking of when they were still alive, Ma Yan wrote a note for some poems: To Ma Hua and Hu Xudong. Either lightly, or solemnly. After Ma Hua and Ma Yan both left, Hu Xudong wrote alone again: To Ma Yan and Ma Hua.

So I searched for "Ma Hua" on Douban, and found a group with the same name founded in 2008. The leader of the group has already cancelled the account, and no one knows the situation. And those who wrote "Hello, Ma Hua" long and lavishly commemorative texts more than ten years ago, stopped writing after 2015. Or think optimistically, just not writing here. But it's not always a happy thing.

In this group, the way people mourn Ma Hua is to write poems and write them down year after year. There are many poems here, all written to Ma Hua. The last update was in 2017. The most active person is still writing poetry alone, but no one has responded to him anymore.

New verses have not appeared until today. In 2021, after another brand new Sunday, in the days after Hu Xudong's death, I didn't even see a single line of poetry written for him.

The poet flies away. How I hope that I can borrow a poem, not to seek friendship with Jinlan, but to meet them in the lightning.

Write a little bit of thought at the end. Recently, I have seen a lot of poems by Hu Xudong published by the media, but there is only one poem "Writing to Those Friends Who Disappeared on the Road of Writing Poems". .

Later, I saw a public account that read poems and said that they were banned by people complaining about pornography. So I guess that the reason why everyone missed this song alone is very likely to be this.

This thing strikes me as absurd, a poet dies, his poems are scattered like snowflakes, and people are busy commemorating. At this time, reading some of his poems risked being accused of "pornography". But the more I do, the more I want to know, and the more I want others to know. So I ended up posting the poem here:

 To those friends who disappeared on the road of writing poetry
I miss you guys.
At this moment, the Brazilian sun is as big as an ox, colliding with my ferocious memory in mid-air. In my memory, all of you were young and vigorous, holding 9981 jins of poetry axe, in the most obscene years at the end of the 20th century, when you saw Buddha splitting Buddha, seeing Niu Jie Niu, and seeing beauty with fat words. Chop off with an axe and take down Erguotou. At night,
After we are asleep, the poetry in us is more vicious than we are. They kicked over spittoons, bicycles,
Bookshelves crawling with cockroaches, posted with the words "Poetry withering,
Telegraph poles with small advertisements such as "lifting but not firm" have robbed the Jade Emperor's territory: even the stars have to pay protection fees to them,
Even the moon was touched by them in the fourteen rows overgrown with weeds.
Our poems are bound together on lightning, but our people are scattered in the world, and no sound is heard: some are officials and stable.
Some are cunning in business, some are lubricating the dry lower body of the media industry, and some are holding the steel whip of advertising to shove wealth.
Brothers, no matter where you are, you are the luckiest people, because in the sky, those verses with hairy chests that we once wrote are still guarding your vitality like the guards of the hospital. You will return to the land of poetry at the happiest moment: where money is the bastard, beauty is the bastard, and poetry is the biggest bastard, but it is the place where all the splendor of the world is conceived.

June 16, 2004 Brasilia

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