Contra Trump

投木報瓊

 

Grace & Justice is a work in Old Odes, New Poems 新詩經體詩, a series by Jianli that draws inspiration from The Book of Songs, the fountain head of Chinese literature. It was inspired by reports that more than a dozen Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico had been detained by immigration officials and ICE agents.

On Thanksgiving 2025, we reproduce two poems by Jianli related to ICE, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency supervised by the Department of Homeland Security. Under the Trump administration it has become the largest and most well-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history. Functioning far beyond the parameters of its original brief, ICE has become an often anonymous and increasingly aggressive arm of state-sanctioned terror.

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In his encomium for John Minford’s translation of the I Ching, the Anglo-Chinese novelist Timothy Mo said that it

throws fresh light on the great Chinese classic of the occult. It is a kind of unholy resurrection, a cable that disappears into the abyss of a darker time. In it the Bronze age predicts to the Information Age the shadow of what is to come.

Jianli’s Old Odes, New Poems also describe a trajectory starting in ‘the abyss of a darker time’ that tracks through into the high-digital era of the present. Here we mark Thanksgiving 2025 with Jianli’s Grace & Justice followed by an analysis of the poem by Ren Jingjing.

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For other works in our series Old Odes, New Poems, see:

• The Ji Clan at Mar-a-Lago; and,
• When to Cherish Virtue is an Indictment — the poet Jianli on Donald Trump’s America.

We are grateful to the editor of China Thought Express for permission to reproduce this material, with minor emendations.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
27 November 2025

Thanksgiving

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ICE Man
冰人

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An enforcement action targeting a preschool tore open the calm of daily life. On the morning of October 29, two agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violently arrested a female teacher inside a day-care center in Chicago’s North Center. They entered armed, wearing vests marked “POLICE ICE”. Through the glass door one could hear the woman’s screams; the agents dragged her outside and pinned her at the threshold. People gasped, toddlers cried, parents and teachers watching broke down in tears. An elected local official, after viewing the video, called it “horrific”. A clear moral line lay before us: children were present; a classroom was present; violence was present.

Faced with such a scene, the poet did not look away. Jianli 漸離 responded with ICE Man.

The poem consists of three stanzas, each in four-beat lines. Each stanza opens by naming the “ice man”, fixing the tone at once. The following three lines respond to an interrogation in a style that draws on the classic Book of Songs, each question is marked by the ancient word 胡 hú (“why”):

胡輕瀆師恩
胡駭垂髫
胡謂汝信神

Why slight the teacher’s grace?
Why terrify these little ones?
Why say you believe in God?

Each stanza closes with a judgmental cadence, as if a verdict were entered: “the freaks sit easy” 狂怪恬然; “the long sky weeps” 長空淋淋; “the people cannot bear their lot” 民不堪命. Four lines per stanza: the turns are crisp, the feeling advances in order—from the shock of “tears falling freely” to the fear and anger of “children frightened”, and finally to the ethical charge of “utterly without human feeling”. The four-beat measure, the parallelism, the cross-examination make the narration beat like a drum. In three brief stanzas and three hard questions, the poem lands three blows and then three gavel-strikes. It is short; its questions are uncompromising. It lays the agents’ mental posture, society’s response, and the standards of faith on the Lord’s bench to be checked. The three stanzas complete a passage from witnessing to naming to judging. The form is restrained; the language is pared down. The classical poem’s function of satire revives here without ornament. …

Two traditions have long coexisted in the United States. One is the tradition of “children of light” — respect for the rule of law, the protection of the weak, welcome extended to the stranger. The other is the tradition of “Son of Darkness” — fear to rally the many, exclusion to bind the few. The two struggle on, as Xue Baochai 薛寶釵 says in Dream of the Red Chamber 《紅樓夢》: “Either the east wind overcomes the west wind, or the west wind overcomes the east wind.” In America today, ill wind suppresses fair wind. Everyone, by their choices, gives force either to the just current or the vicious one. The dividing line is not birth, not skin, not nationality, but choice. Those in uniform may belong to the light or to the dark; those without papers may belong to the light or to the dark. There is only one rule of measure: do you treat the human being as an end, and do you hold the least compassion fast?

Among those in uniform there is a kind of enforcer named by Hannah Arendt: the “banality of evil”. Arendt’s analysis concerns a mechanistic evil whose core is the renunciation of judgment and a systematic lowering of others. The actors call themselves “ordinary people,” hand over judgment to the system, and with thoughtless obedience carry out harmful orders. This evil is not dramatic madness; it is numbness. But reality also shows another kind of evil. It actively seeks the theater of fright. It chooses symbolic ground on which to act. It selects postures that can produce the greatest fear and then lowers “the other” into a target. When certain enforcers, masked and armed, drag with force in a space where children are present, and reduce “the other” to a mere “example”, “metric”, or “image risk”, the path of lowering is already set. If there is an added choice to display and a rhetoric to match, the evil is no longer banal. This is an evil beyond banality. …

Evil beyond banality does not end with a single scene. It triggers a chain reaction and pushes the whole community toward a colder place. First, anti-immigrant feeling accelerates. Showy hardness is often advertised as “effective governance,” becoming a pretext for more rough action. Second, trust in law erodes. The fear impressed upon children becomes long-term distrust among parents and teachers; the cost of enforcement rises. Third, religion and civic ethics are torn. Piety on the tongue with reduction of others in deed drains faith-words of credibility. Fourth, trauma becomes intergenerational. Children’s memories leave marks; communal memory ferments. To choose demonstrative fear and humiliating enforcement is to choose the part of the son of darkness. Those who choose darkness live in darkness; those who sow hatred reap hatred. Evil sown is evil harvested.

When power presents itself as ice, poets should answer as fire. “A heart of poetry burns hot; it melts ice to shield the flowers.” A poet’s task is not to give orders but to name, to witness, to record. To press the word ice man onto the page is to tell the community: there is conduct here that betrays love; there is procedure here that climbs over people. A poem is not a verdict, but it is a thermometer, a mirror and a signpost. ICE Man points to a road by which justice may be known.

The poem succeeds because it draws a complex issue back to the simplest judgments. It does not wrangle over procedural details. It asks three things: whom did you humiliate, whom did you frighten, what is the plainest love you broke? It reminds us that the measure of civilization is not in grand phrases or ceremonial oaths but in our bearing before the most vulnerable. It also reminds enforcers that acting under law and treating others as human are not in conflict; they sustain each other. Only by holding the baseline — that of the human individual — can law have warmth and order have lasting force.

To name the ice men is the minimum vigil. To keep the command “love thy neighbour” near at heart is the requirement minimum self-awareness. To let a child’s cry anchor public judgment is the minimum of civilization. ICE Man is brief, yet it completes a necessary unveiling: ends justifying means, results overriding process, violence deployed to maintain order, injustice enlisted to prop up “justice”. This evil is no longer banal. Such non-banal evil is a great scourge across America’s social, political, economic and cultural life. It must be exposed and excoriated. To expose this evil is precisely why a poem like ICE Man is necessary exist. Herein lies the abiding social function of poetry.

— 漸離,《冰人》and an analysis by Ren Jingjing 任晶晶
trans. China Thought Express, 14 November 2025
with minor revisions by China Heritage

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《恩義》Grace & Justice

漸離 Jianli

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On Jianli’s Poem Grace & Justice

當“感恩”變成驅逐—讀漸離《恩義》

Ren Jingjing 任晶晶

translated by China Thought Express with minor emendations by China Heritage

Around Thanksgiving, discounts in the malls, turkey and pumpkin pie readily distract from the day’s real history: the first “thanksgiving” was a time when Indigenous people saved starving, freezing European settlers. A few hundred years later, those same indigenous peoples were driven into wastelands and onto reservations; today, their descendants may still be treated as “illegal immigrants,” nearly “deported” by their own government to countries they have never known. Jianli’s 漸離 poem Grace & Justice《恩義》twists this historical thread together. In archaic, Book of Songs–style Chinese, it turns “grace” and “justice,” rescue and expulsion, Thanksgiving and Indigenous fate, into a kind of reverse reckoning.

感恩節前後，商場的折扣、火雞與南瓜派，往往蓋住了這一天真正的歷史：最早的“感恩”，是印第安人救活飢寒交迫的歐洲移民；幾百年後，原住民被趕進荒漠，今天甚至還能被當成“非法移民”，差點被本國政府“遣返”到陌生國家。漸離的《恩義》，正是把這條歷史線索扭在一起，用《詩經》式的古漢語，對“恩”與“義”、救助與驅逐、感恩節與原住民命運，做了一次反向清算。

On the surface, this poem looks like a “hymn.” It opens with “Holy on high, far off Heaven,” and closes with “holy indeed this Trinity,” as if it were giving praise to Heaven and to the Triune God. Between those two invocations, though, every line turns back on itself: praise becomes accusation, thanksgiving becomes interrogation. The two characters “恩義” (“grace” and “justice”) ought to be the moral theme of Thanksgiving. Here, they are presented as concepts that have been perverted and betrayed: grace is not repaid, but answered with violence; justice is not upheld, but used to justify the expulsion of those who once offered shelter.

這首詩表面是一篇“頌歌”，開頭“聖哉彼蒼”，結尾“聖哉三一”，看似向上蒼、向三一上帝致敬，字裡行間卻處處翻轉，把贊美寫成控訴，把謝恩寫成追問。“恩義”二字，本應是感恩節的主題，在這裡卻被寫成被扭曲、被出賣的道德詞彙：有恩不報，反以暴報德；有義不守，反以驅逐回報接待者。

Formally, Grace and Justice is a self-conscious experiment in “New Book of Songs style.” The poem has four stanzas, each of eight lines, each line four characters long, their rhythm short and emphatic:

Holy on high, far off Heaven,
the mandate shifts and strays;
its brightness lives among us,
its glory crowns our days.

The poet’s tonality is not bound by strict rules, but his voice is taut, close in feel to the hymns and court odes found in the ancient Book of Songs. Each stanza has a recurring pattern: “There came guests, there came guests,” “They talk of peach for plum-gift,” “They chant of grace and justice,” “holy indeed this Trinity.” Structurally, these refrains echo across the poem. They are not simple repetitions; they advance the narrative arc, step by step: from the arrival of “guests,” to the memory of those guests, to the betrayal and expulsion of those guests, and finally to the present-day holiday of “praising grace and justice.”

從形式上看，《恩義》自覺地把自己寫成一首“新詩經體”作品。全詩四章，每章八句，四字成句，節奏短促而有力：“聖哉彼蒼/天命靡常/明明在下/赫赫在上。”平仄不拘，但語氣緊繃，和《詩經》中的頌詩、雅詩非常接近。每章都有重復句式：“有客有客”“有客有客”“投桃報李”“投木報瓊”“聖哉彼蒼”“聖哉三一”，篇章結構上形成呼應。這種復沓，不是簡單的疊句，而是有層次地推進：從“有客”之來，到“有客”之被懷念，再到“有客”遭背棄、受驅趕，最後進入當下節日的“頌恩頌義”，形成一條完整的敘事線。

Put another way, the poem uses the form of The Book of Songs to tell a modern tale. The story of the farmer and the snake has been moved to the North American continent—only now the farmer is the Indigenous host, the snake is white settler society, and the words “grace” and “justice” are turned back on themselves.

The first stanza lays down the poem’s moral premise:

Holy on high, far off Heaven.
Its mandate shifts and strays;
its brightness lives among us,
its glory crowns our days.

It rests on deeds of virtue
that bind the four lands on.
There came guests, there came guests;
their kindness is not gone.

“Holy on high, far off Heaven. / Its mandate shifts and strays” borrows the political language of the State of Zhou, pointing out that Heaven’s mandate is never chained to one people forever; its true foundation lies in “deeds of virtue.” “Its brightness lives among us / its glory crowns our days” calls Heaven and the human moral order into correspondence — what is bright above should be bright below. The closing lines — “There came guests, there came guests; / their kindness is not gone” — sound like a slogan for a hospitable land, yet they sum up the history of “Indigenous hosts receiving white newcomers.” They treated strangers from afar as “guests,” received them with courtesy, and “did not forget kindness.”

換句話說，這首詩是用《詩經》的形式在講一個現代寓言：農夫與蛇的故事被搬到北美大地——只是農夫變成印第安人，蛇變成白人社會，而“恩義”兩個字被反過來使用。

詩的第一章，是一段價值前提的鋪墊：“天命靡常 / 明明在下 / 赫赫在上 / 維德之行 / 使挾四方 / 有客有客 / 懷德不忘”。“天命靡常”，引用周人政治語匯，點出天命並不固定在某一族群，真正的根基在“德之行”。“明明在下 / 赫赫在上”，上下呼應，既是對上蒼的贊嘆，也是對人間道德秩序的召喚。末尾的“有客有客 / 懷德不忘”，看似只是好客之邦的自我形象，實則是對“原住民接待白人”那段歷史的提綱挈領：他們把遠方來客當作“有客”，以禮相待、“懷德不忘”。

The second stanza focusses in on a specific feast:

Drums, bells, in ringing thunder,
stone pipes and flutes reply;
honoured guests have arrived here,
the host is glad on high.

With meat and drink they’re filled up,
with oxen and with lambs.
There came guests, there came guests;
who spoke of watch and guards?

Drums and bells resound, stone chimes and pipes play; this is the ritual soundscape of an ancestral sacrifice. Yet it is hard not to think of the story of that “first Thanksgiving”: crops finally coming to fruition and being harvested, Indigenous people and Puritan settlers seated at one table, sharing game and grain. “With meat and drink they’re filled up, / with oxen and with lambs” evokes abundance. The key line is “There came guests, there came guests; / who spoke of watch and guards?” In that moment, the hosts felt no need to “be on guard” against their guests. The question is weighted with irony: the hosts did not scheme or fence themselves in, but afterwards they were the ones subject to calculation and encroachment.

第二章把鏡頭拉近到一場具體的宴飲：“鐘鼓喤喤 / 磐筦將將 / 嘉賓至兮 / 主人悅兮 / 既醉既飽 / 維牛維羊 / 有客有客 / 豈曰慎防？”鐘鼓齊鳴，磐石與管樂交織，這是典型的宗廟禮樂場景，但讀者很難不想到所謂“第一次感恩節”的敘事：莊稼初成，印第安人與清教徒同席而坐，分享獵物和糧食。“既醉既飽 / 維牛維羊”是豐盛的象徵，“豈曰慎防？”則是關鍵一問——那一刻，主人對客人沒有“慎防”的心理，這一問暗含反諷：當年的主人沒有提防，後來卻被接連“算計”。

The third stanza turns sharply from praise to balance on a blade’s edge:

They talk of peach for plum-gift,
throw sticks for jade long due;
they spurn the grace of neighbours,
turn wrath on friends they knew.

They fatten hawks with feeding,
then snatch away your eyes.
Our grandsires, all our kindred,
like broken reeds, wind-blown!

On the surface, the stanza still uses the language of courteous reciprocity — “they talk of peach for plum-gift” — but the next line flips things around: “throw sticks for jade long due.” One side offers jade, but what is given in return is dead wood; it is not even a matter of unequal exchange, but of outright bad faith. “They spurn the grace of neighbours, / turn wrath on friends they knew” is no longer about breaches between households; it names betrayal on a national scale — treaties broken, then the Indian Removal Act, followed by a string of forced marches and land grabs.

The couplet “They fatten hawks with feeding, / then snatch away your eyes” is particularly fierce. First, “they fatten hawks,” using aid, treaties, and cooperation to raise a hunting bird, then the hawk turns and claws out “your eyes.” “Eyes” represent sight and understanding; they are also a window on people’s spiritual core. These lines map almost directly onto the history: Indigenous nations once fed and aided settlers; later they were crushed by organised armies and the law. In the present, Indigenous descendants can still be seen as “illegals,” almost “deported” to a country with which they have no ties.

第三章完全調轉語氣，從贊頌變成刀鋒：“投桃報李/投木報瓊/背惠怒鄰/棄信忘忠”。表面上仍是“投桃報李”這套禮尚往來的辭令，緊接著卻是“投木報瓊”：人家給的是美玉，回報卻只是枯木，甚至連“等價交換”都談不上。“背惠怒鄰 / 棄信忘忠”已經不再是一家一戶之間的失禮，而是國家層面的背信——從早期條約到《印第安人遷移法》，都是在“背惠”的路上越走越遠。詩句中的“飼鷹以食 / 攫爾之瞳”，意象十分犀利：先“飼鷹”，用恩惠、條約、協助來養大一頭猛禽，然後鷹爪反過來挖出“爾之瞳”——瞳孔是視線，是認知，也是一個民族的靈魂。這兩句幾乎可以直接對照那段歷史：原住民當初扶持、援助殖民者，後來反被成建制軍隊和法律碾壓；今天原住民後裔甚至會被執法系統當成“非法目標”，差點被“遣返”到一個毫無關係的國家。

“Our grandsires, all our kindred, / like broken reeds, wind-blown!” closes the stanza by bringing large-scale violence down to the level of blood and exile. “Broken reeds” and “wind-blown tufts” are old images used Han-dynasty ballads and Tang poems to describe those who are without roots. They fall naturally in step with the histories of peoples like the Cherokees or Dakotas, and with the forced removals endured by many native tribes: grace and justice destroyed, the most direct result of which is that “the ancestors” become like broken stalks in the wind, with “no land and no home” left to call their own.

“我祖我宗 / 斷梗飄蓬”，一句收束，把宏大的歷史暴力落實到血緣和流亡經驗上。“斷梗”“飄蓬”來自漢樂府和唐詩的舊意，寫無根之人，和切爾克斯人、達科他人、以及被強制遷移的印第安部族經歷，有著天然的對接。恩義被毀，最直接的結果，是“祖宗”變成風中的斷梗，從此“既無其土，亦無其家”。

The fourth stanza brings the narrative up to the present:

The feast day draws still nearer;
by night and dawn they pray.
Blows none had earned fall sudden,
the ICE-men rave and storm!

They bully and they swagger,
seize others’ nests for home.
They chant of grace and justice—
holy the Three-in-One!

“The feast day draws still nearer; / by night and dawn they pray” points toward holidays of “giving thanks,” Thanksgiving among them. “By night and dawn they pray” is a familiar pious posture from the mouths of saints, but here the poem follows it with “Blows none had earned fall, sudden, / the ICE-men rave and storm!” In the I Ching, “Innocence” [hexagram 25] is the name for calamities not brought on by one’s own fault. Here, it stands in for those “errors” that “should never have happened and yet keep happening” — like a single typo on an ICE document that can send an Indigenous woman to the brink of “deportation.” “ICE-men” puns on “ice” and on the initials of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The old word 冰人 bīngrén (“go-between, matchmaker”) turns into ICE agents. Matchmakers are supposed to bring households together; in practice, the power that carries the acronym “ICE” tears families apart. “Rave and storm” names the frenzy of a bureaucracy that insists these are only “paper mistakes,” even as it upends lives.

第四章把時間推回當下：“佳節將至 / 夙夜敬止 / 無妄之降 / 冰人其狂！”“佳節將至”，隱指感恩節等“頌恩”的節日；“夙夜敬止”是聖徒口中常見的虔敬姿態，詩里卻接上“無妄之降”：《易經》里的“無妄”本是天災，這裡指的是那些“本不該發生卻一再發生”的“錯誤”——比如一紙弄錯名字的 ICE 拘留令，就能把一位原住民女性推到“被遣返”的懸崖邊。“冰人其狂”，幾乎是一個雙關：既是古漢語里主婚媒人的稱呼，又在音節上暗合“ICE”。媒人本應撮合姻緣，如今卻成了拆散家庭的暴力機關；“其狂”，指向的正是那種借“文書錯誤”之名的制度性暴行。

The last four lines —“They bully and they swagger, / seize others’ nests for home. / They chant of grace and justice — / holy the Three-in-One!” — drive the irony home. “They bully and they swagger” is the street phrase for abusing power; “seize others’ nests for home” is the old idiom for occupying someone else’s house. Together they sketch the long occupation of Indigenous lands by white society. The hardest lines to swallow are “They chant of grace and justice — / their Holy Trinity!” On one side are Thanksgiving prayers, hymns and the self-image of a “nation of faith”, on the other is the mass, long-term expulsion of indigenous peoples and of new migrants. Although the poet never uses the word “hypocrisy”, the clash between the image and reality is embedded in the lines: Who is doing the praising? To whom does grace flow? Are those who have been driven off their land, those tagged as “suspect bodies”, also share in the promise of “grace and justice”?

最後四句“作威作福 / 鵲巢鳩居 / 頌恩頌義 / 聖哉三一！”再一次把反諷推到高點。“作威作福”是濫用權力的俗語，“鵲巢鳩居”是佔據他人家園的成語，兩者緊連，畫出的恰是白人社會對印第安人土地的長期佔據。最刺痛的一句，是“頌恩頌義 / 聖哉三一！”——一邊是感恩節里的禱告、贊美詩和“信仰之國”的自我形象，一邊是對原住民、新移民的系統性驅逐。詩人沒有直接喊出“虛偽”二字，但這兩句本身就形成了足夠強烈的道德衝突：誰在頌恩？恩賜給了誰？那些被趕出土地、被當成“可疑對象”的人，是否算在“恩義”的範圍里？

Within the Book of Songs tradition, Grace and Justice carry on the spirit of the “Airs” and “Odes,” with their interplay play of 興 (evocative image), 比 (analogy) and 怨 (complaint). Poems like “Guanzhui” 關雎, “Mang” 氓 or “Going Forth with the Chariots” 出車 are not imperial panegyrics; they begin from the love for and suffering of ordinary people. Here, the poet uses ancient phraseology and prosody to limn a twenty-first-century political reality as though it were a Zhou-era epic. In form, it revives an old meter, in feeling, it reaches back in time to a homegrown tradition of critical realism — only now the target of critique is a modern state that calls itself “free,” “grateful” and one that enjoys the “rule of law.”

從《詩經》的傳統來看，《恩義》承繼的是“風”“雅”中那種“以興、以比、以怨”的寫法。《關雎》《氓》《出車》都不是帝王頌德，而是從尋常人的情感和苦難切入。這裡，詩人借古語、用古調，把一個21世紀的政治現實寫得像一篇周人史詩。形式上，是對古體的復活；情感上，是對“批判現實主義”的重新拾起——只是這一次，批判對象換成了一個自稱“自由、感恩和法治”的現代國家。

To borrow Harold Bloom’s phrasing in The Art of Reading Poetry, the difference between a good poem and a bad one lies in whether its language feels “inevitable” or merely “predictable.” Lines such as “They talk of peach for plum-gift, / throw sticks for jade long due,” “They fatten hawks with feeding, / then snatch away your eyes,” and “They chant of grace and justice — / sacred is their Trinity!” cannot simply be dismissed as stock phrases. The effect of this metaphorical landscape is achieved by its very strangeness, describing as they do a world that is familiar yet skewed. The poet twists old idioms and applies them to new objects and the reader is confronted  by a sudden temporal and linguistic shift. The farmer-and-snake parable becomes a story of Indigenous hosts and colonizers; the matchmaker turns into ICE; “thanksgiving” becomes a removal order. What feels “inevitable” in these lines comes from their precision: change a word and the charge drains away.

如果借用哈羅德·布魯姆在《讀詩的藝術》中的說法，一首好詩和一首差詩的差別，在於語言是“不可避免”還是“可以預料”。“投桃報李 / 投木報瓊”“飼鷹以食 / 攫爾之瞳”“鵲巢鳩居 / 頌恩頌義”這些句子，很難說是“套路化”的反帝口號。它們的比喻有一種“殊異”（strangeness）：既熟悉又陌生，把古老成語扭了一下，用到新的對象上，讓讀者在一瞬間意識到意義的轉折——農夫與蛇變成原住民與殖民者，媒人變成 ICE，“感恩”變成驅逐令。“不可避免”的感覺來自這種語義上的精確：換別的詞，味道就全變了。

Compared with much contemporary “political metaphor poetry”, Grace & Justice is careful not to pile on news clips or substitute slogans for images. The history of U.S. independence, the Indian Removal Act, Dakota resistance and the Indigenous woman who was nearly “mis-deported” by ICE all remain just outside the frame of the poem. Inside, there is only the diction of the ancient Book of Songs. Contemporary reality only impinges on the reader gradually, through the new uses of old formulas—“grace repaid with sticks,” “broken reeds, wind-blown,” “the ICE-men rave and storm”. This leaves room for the imagination and the reader is required to bring in their own knowledge to complete the bridge that links poetic allusion to present-day fact.

和常見的“政治隱喻詩”相比，《恩義》的優勢在於，它沒有直接堆砌新聞材料，也沒有用直白的口號去替代意象。美國獨立、印第安人遷移法、達科他獨立運動、原住民女性差點被 ICE“誤遣返”這些背景，都在詩外；詩里只有《詩經》式的詞；真正的現實感，是從“投木報瓊”“斷梗飄蓬”“冰人其狂”這些舊詞的新用里，慢慢滲出來的。這種寫法，使文本留出一個想象的空隙，讓讀者把自己的知識和經驗填進去，完成從典故到現實的連線。

The poet’s artistic strategy carries its own risks. On the one hand, the density of classical phrases — “deeds of virtue”, “by night and dawn they pray”, “blows none had earned” — means that modern readers without the requisite background will not find every layer of meaning immediately obvious. On the other hand, the poem never identifies its targets — Anglo-American culture, the discursive environment of Thanksgiving, structural violence — without flinching; it relies on structure and word choice to achieve its impact. If the reader does not know the history behind Jianli’s verse, they may only read it as an abstract hymn to “grace and justice”, or perhaps even mistake it for a devotional prayer. It is an opacity built-in to the demands that the Book of Songs style of poetry makes on the reader.

當然，這樣的寫作也有它的風險。一方面，古語的密度很高，像“維德之行”“夙夜敬止”“無妄之降”之類，對現代讀者來說並不完全透明，需要一定的文化儲備。另一方面，諷刺的對象——英格魯撒克遜白人文化、感恩節話語、結構性暴力——在詩中並未被點名，只通過結構和用詞暗指。如果讀者對相關歷史不熟，可能只讀到一個抽象的“恩義頌”，甚至誤以為這是一首虔敬的宗教贊歌，這也是“新詩經體”在傳播上的一個天然門檻。

Yet it is precisely within this tension that Grace & Justice reveals its ambition. It does not merely mimic the syntax of The Book of Songs. Unlike much “new archaic verse” that strains to escape from reality, this poem drags reality into the deep recesses of classical speech: “Thanksgiving,” “deportation,” “ICE,” “Indigenous peoples” all move under the cover of old words. In this sense, it continues a tradition dating back to The Book of Songs in a particularly faithful way: with short lines, with images and analogies and with seemingly oblique utterance, it expresses the bluntest of truths about injustice.

但正是在這樣的張力里，《恩義》展現了“新詩經體”的文學野心：不是簡單模仿《詩經》的句式，而是用這種古老的格律，去說最尖銳的當代問題。和一般意義上的“新古風”不同，這裡沒有逃避現實，而是主動把現實拉進古典話語里，讓“感恩節”“驅逐”“ICE”“印第安人”這些詞，在不露聲色的古漢語背後響動。某種意義上，這正是《詩經》傳統在今天的延續：用短句、用興比，用看似含蓄的表達，說最直白的人間不平。

For poets writing today, Jianli’s poem is also a quiet warning. As “the borders of creation are dissolving” and now that AI programs can imitate almost any literary style, churn out any “archaic form” with a simple prompt, what cannot be automated is not metre, but the poet’s insights into reality and uncompromising ear for exact language. An algorithm can patch together phrases like “Holy on high, far-off Heaven” or “Its mandate shifts and strays.” It is far less likely to invent a line like “the ICE-men rave and storm,” with its double-edged meaning, or to hide a specific institutional violence inside the language of the I Ching and The Book of Songs. Form can be mimicked; judgment and moral instinct are harder to fake.

對今天的詩人來說，這首詩的啓發在於：當“創作的邊界正在消融”，AI 可以模仿任何風格、生成任何“古體”，真正難以被複製的不是形式，而是那種對現實的敏銳感和對語言的精准把握。AI 可以拼貼出“聖哉彼蒼”“天命靡常”之類的古風詞彙，卻很難在“冰人其狂”里完成那種雙重指涉，也很難把一個具體的制度暴力嵌進《易經》與《詩經》的語境中。形式可以被算法模仿，價值判斷和道德直覺卻很難自動生成。

More broadly, the meaning of holidays like Thanksgiving will be hollowed if they are never forced to confront the unsettling the histories that underpin them. The poem reminds us that “giving thanks” is not just about “praising grace and justice” for the strong, but about remembering those who truly helped you survive and flourish, as well as refusing to repay them with harm. “There came guests, there came guests; / their kindness is not gone” should be the heart of the holiday: remember who brought grain in the dead of winter, who taught you to plant; remember whose bones seeded this ground; remember, too, who stand today in restaurants, farms, and warehouses, sustaining the economy under the name of “new immigrants,” while the law and public speech paint them as “risks” and “burdens.”

從更大的範圍看，“感恩節”這樣的節日如果不重新回望歷史，也會慢慢空心化，只剩下消費和例行公事的禱告。《恩義》提醒人們：感恩不是對強者“頌恩頌義”，而是對真正給過生命幫助的人和群體，心裡記得、不忘本、不背惠。“有客有客 / 懷德不忘”應當成為這個節日的核心：記得當初是誰在嚴冬里送來糧食、教會種植；記得是誰為這片土地付出屍骨；也記得今天是誰在餐館、農場、物流倉庫里，以“新移民”的身份支撐著美國經濟，卻在法律和輿論里被當成“風險”和“負擔”。

When a state can brush off a near-deportation [as in the case of Leticia Jacobo] as a mere “clerical error” and never apologise to the Indigenous woman it nearly cast out; when a society can acknowledge the cruelty of the Indian Removal Act yet repeat similar patterns of behaviour in its newly formulated expulsion policies, that kind of “thanksgiving” does indeed call for reexamination. The poem Grace & Justice does just this: with the cadences of an ancient hymn, it raises that age-old question — What is grace, or justice? Who gives thanks? Who is expelled? Who is it exactly who seizes the another’s nest, yet still demands that they “sing of grace and justice”?

當一個國家可以輕描淡寫地把一份“文書錯誤”當成解釋，卻不為險些被“誤遣返”的原住民道歉；當一個社會可以承認“印第安人遷移法”的殘酷，卻又在新的驅逐政策中重復同樣的結構——這樣的“感恩”，確實需要被重新審問。《恩義》做的事情，就是用古體詩把這個問題重新舉到人面前：何為“恩”？何為“義”？誰在感恩？誰被驅逐？誰在“鵲巢鳩居”，卻還要別人“頌恩頌義”？

In Harold Bloom’s view, great poetry expands human consciousness, helping us “become artists of ourselves” (Bloom, p. 45). A short poem like Grace & Justice is not a “supreme” work in that sense, but it edges in that direction: it asks readers to extract themselves from the holiday haze and the habitual rhetoric of celebration, to feel, in the rise and fall of its four-character lines, the weight of historical debts and present-day falsehoods. When we read “Our grandsires, all our kindred, / like broken reeds, wind-blown,” we should not stop at the old image of “the displaced”. We should also see those who are still being pushed and tagged and mishandled under new designations also include “migrants”.

在哈羅德·布魯姆看來，偉大詩歌的任務，是擴展人的意識，幫助人“成為自己的自由藝術家”（Bloom 45）。《恩義》這樣一首短詩，顯然談不上“終極偉大”，但它已經在朝這個方向用力：它要求讀者把自己從節日的麻醉和話語的慣性中抽離出來，在四字短句的起落間，重新意識到這塊大陸上的歷史債務和話語謊言。讀到“我祖我宗 / 斷梗飄蓬”時，想到的不該只是古典意象里的“流離失所”，還應看到今天依然在被驅趕、被標籤化、被錯誤對待的那些新移民。

Thanksgiving will go on. Social media will be crowded with images of turkeys, tables laden with family fare and the strains of “God bless America.” Jianli’s poem Grace & Justice is like The Upside Down that lurks beneath the festivities. In that realm, drums and bells also resound loudly, the oxen and sheep are there, too, but the “host” is different. The original hosts are roped outside the cordon and treated as suspicious intruders.

A good poem cannot overturn an institution, but it may make some descendants of those European settlers pause for a moment after they have bowed their heads in prayer and before they raise a glass to salute this “Happy Thanksgiving” and ask perchance: to whom should this vessel of gratitude be offered?

感恩節到了，社交媒體上會繼續刷著火雞、親友聚餐和“感恩上帝賜福美國”的圖文。漸離這首《恩義》，像是刻意貼在這些圖像背後的另一張底片：在那張底片上，鐘鼓依舊，牛羊依舊，唯獨“主人”換了人，真正的原主人站在封鎖線之外，被當成“可疑人口”。一首好詩的力量，也許就在這裡——它不能改變制度，卻可以讓一些歐洲移民的後裔，向造物主低頭禱告之後，舉杯說出“感恩節快樂”的時候，心裡想一想：這一杯感恩的酒，本來該敬給誰？

Works Cited

• Harold Bloom, The Art of Reading Poetry, New York: HarperCollins, 2004

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Source:

• Jianli & Ren Jingjing, When “Thanksgiving” Turns into Expulsion — On Jianli’s Grace and Justice, China Thought Express, 27 November 2025

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