A Room of My Own: The answer is blowin' in the wind

for young students who have activated Hong Kong’s largest-scale civil disobedience campaign ever to defend democracy and fight for universal and equal suffrage (See updates below)

the riot police
tighten in a ring
of shields and masks
around sit-in protesters --
a flurry of doves

a wall of students

linked arm-in-arm ...

Occupy Central
with Love and Peace

swaying in moonlight

Note: Hong Kong's main financial district is known as Central.


Updated, 9am:

The protesters in Ferguson expressed solidarity with Hong Kong's Occupy Central  pro-democracy students














Below is my tanka sequence written for the protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, USA

We shall overcome someday ...

the flurry of white
between church steeples
in Ferguson
a line of police
clad in battle fatigues

the cops dart in
cleaving the crowd in two --
a black woman
yells in her husky voice
Don't be afraid! Stand your ground

Ferguson at dusk ...
his bony hands in the air
a black man
standing his ground
as police fire tear gas


Updated, 12pm:

Hong Kong's Central:
lines of students stand firm
in clouds of tear gas
facing off
with the riot police


Updated on October 1, the "National Day" of the People's Republic of China 

as if
stars were spread thick
across the Hong Kong sky:
a mobile light vigil
in the Central District