Classic Poem

A cooperative council was going to be set up
to convey people's wishes upward, I was told.
A man whom I had long respected came one night,
talked at length about the faults of the nation as it was,
and told me to become a member.
It wasn't an age when one could be surprised at abruptness.
If people's wishes could be conveyed upward,
I had a mountain of things I wanted conveyed upward.
In the end I became a member.
Once it begins to turn,
all the cogs move, like it or not.
Would people's wishes brought in by individuals
be conveyed upward?
A weird sort of pressure, on the contrary,
pressed down from above.
The cooperative council became an organization
that followed a certain will.
From the fifth floor where the council was,
I could see the mausoleumlike Diet.
The poem in which I mentioned the mausoleumlike Diet
was returned from a newspaper with a red mark.
The council had a suffocating air,
the wild animal inside me
was poisoned by the smell of bureaucracy
and roared, every night, toward a deserted land.