Beijing (PTI): Chinese are going public with their grief, using the Internet to express their personal heartbreak through poems in the aftermath of the tragic earthquake in Sichuan province that has killed nearly 70,000 people.

Quake-related poems have appeared on a number of websites. Verses are written in memory of lost children, parents, teachers or simply about life where words are difficult. "When the heart is knived, the pain permeates the whole body. When a small crevice is dealt, the whole would be torn open," wrote Li Shaojun in his poem titled Majority of Chinese suffer depression that was posted on the Internet 10 days ago.

The poem of Li, who was an editor-in-chief of Chinese literature magazine Tianya (Skyline), has already seen more than 100,000 hits from netizens. "After the quake, I felt very sad for the loss of so many lives," Li said, adding "On the other hand, I also felt man was rather weak before nature." "For days, I did not want to talk to anyone until I had the impulse to write a poem on the night of May 19," Li was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency. "I felt relieved and became strong after I finished the poem," he said. "Poems can express our deepest and strongest feelings."

Li took about one hour to complete the five-paragraph poem that expressed his feelings after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake on May 12 which rocked Sichuan and has caused massive devastation and death of nearly 70,000 people.

Like Li, Huo Junming, a professor at Beijing Institute of Education, also wrote two poems after he witnessed thousands of people shouting "Go China" at Tiananmen Square on May 19, the first day of a three-day national mourning in China for the dead.