A squirming blanket of black

Carpets downtown Hong Kong.

Hands grabbing, grasping;

Heads gasping for air that is

Too thick with sweat to breathe.

From my uncle’s apartment—

Sixty-eight deserted floors above the commotion—

I watched.

The dollop trudged,

From five to nine,

Fumbled to City hall,

Then, as a flower wilts,

Split,

Spilling through the streets in

All directions.

They opted for taxi or subway or ferry

Or some permutation of the three.

By nine-thirty, taxis have bled the roads red.

And the subway is a can of tennis balls 

Filled to the brim 

After cramming in

A fistful of ping pong balls and wrestling 

The cap closed with an

Automatic door.

The ferry service closed at ten.

Over six hundred thousand

Donned black T-shirts that day.

I asked my uncle,

“Why black?”

He told me last week it was yellow;

The week before—white.

He told me the color changes based on what social media demands—

That there’s no meaning

Behind it.

But Uncle, is it not a display

Of what the internet is capable of? 

The ability to—in an instant—link hundreds of thousands to one color, one movement?

Like tributaries blinked into a river—

An overnight ocean?

I didn’t say any of that.

As the TV broadcasted the

tear gas, rubber bullets, and handcuffs,

We didn’t say anything at all.