The women carry the seasons of guava, mango, and plum to me,
the seasons of lotus, green young sticky rice on their shoulders,
bringing me the enlightened sunrise, the blue sunset,
dragging their sandal footsteps on the road.
With such little money, I can buy the seasons of guava and lotus,
the small bills
silently
soaked with dew, soaked with sweat.
Behind these women’s backs, from orphaned village fields,
the wind howls endlessly.
They open their embrace:
empty lullabies, swollen with milk.
They carry countless virgin seasons to me;
the seasons I would have forgotten without them.
The aroma of Hưng Yên just coming into being,
the lotus of West Lake
just coming into blood, Vòng village
restless to produce
the green young sticky rice.
They carry to me the fresh breeze from their village
where their mothers, children, and husbands stand waiting,
where dreams are thirsty, and struggle.
I hear their faint singing:
In difficulty, the poles press heavy on my shoulder
but I find ways to feed my mother, ignoring people’s laughs*
They are my stars,
carrying their difficult fates on their shoulders,
unknown in life,
gazing burning questions into my eyes.
* Vietnamese folk poetry
THE BOAT GIRL
Hương, like the perfume of the guavas she picked
in the ripe summer of 1986,
before a boat carried her away
into a thick night of the dark ocean.
Under a dome
woven by blurry stars,
I stood watching her go,
her shoulders a trembling thin leaf
among the forest of leaves clinging together in a hurricane.
With the perfume of her guavas
bursting onto my palms, I ran after her
but a neighbor reached out to pull me into the dark.
“Don’t cry, my child,” she said, “don’t reveal the secret of their
escape.”
I was too young to understand then
about the pain of separation
and the reasons for my country to be slashed in two—
North and South—
the blood of its division bitter in our mouths.
I didn’t know that Hương, the perfume of ripe
guavas that summer,
would lose her lovely name
to the towering waves of a surging storm,
one in hundreds of thousands
of Vietnamese refugees adrift at sea.
I didn’t know
until her mother reappeared
after twenty-five years of living as Elizabeth
far away, in America.
I brought her a handful of guavas
saved from the dome of stars
that watched Hương leave.
Their perfume still burned my fingers
after all those years,
I had wanted to tell her.
But I couldn’t because amidst the pain in her eyes,
I saw Hương dangling on a branch broken in half,
her pure laughter rising up
into raindrops ripe with guava perfume.
SPRING GARDEN
Side by side I sit with my love, at the garden of our longing;
our naked fingers dig deep into the earth.
With the wind shuddering my hair,
I know spring is blossoming on bare branches above my head
where birds call for newborn grass
and a blue sky is willing to burst itself from the failing light.
How would I tell him that I want to fill this garden
with the green of my youth, and sweeten it
with songs that my mother sang to nurse life into my breath,
and that even though I feel fear
take root in my fingertips,
all I need do is to look at his bare hands,
cracked with a life of labor and suffering,
and know it will be safe
to let my heart grow in his love.
PEARLS OF MY AUNT
Once as a child I was so sick,
a burning fever lifted me into the dark.
My soul wanted to fly up, but my aunt’s
cooling fingers tethered me back,
so in the dim haze between life and death,
I saw her tears fall like rivulets of pearls.
I had seen her cry before and I had
kept those pearls deep inside my chest as we
kowtowed our heads three times to Buddha
who sat at our village pagoda,
the roofs curling into half-broken moons.
With trembling hands my aunt had raised a bunch
of burning incense above her head
and begged the unknown world to return to her
the mother of her childhood,
beaten and starved to death,
her bones lost in the fallen sea
of nearly two million Vietnamese
dead in the Great Famine of ’45.
Today my aunt no longer cries as she
kneels by the bedside of my uncle,
dying from cancer, who has to share
his single, tattered hospital bed
with two other withering men. She
doesn’t cry. She smiles to cheer them on.
She smiles as if this world was
wonderful, and worth living.
I stand here with the pearls of my aunt’s courage
blossoming inside my blood,
holding me to the earth.
THE GARMENT WORKERS OF BANGLADESH
For those who perished in a Bangladeshi garment factory building which collapsed on 24 April 2013.
Fifty-two people dead.
One hundred.
Two hundred fifty.
Three hundred and seventy.
Five hundred.
Six hundred and twenty.
More than one thousand perished.
Each day as I opened the newspapers these figures stared back at
me
with twisted, beautiful faces of the women of Bangladesh.
I had met them a few years back
when I was a guest in their city of Dhaka,
crowded with cyclos and their footsteps
as they walked before sunrise to bring light across my house.
I had studied them through the drawn
curtains of our two worlds
but they had burrowed their burdens deep inside their eyes
so when a breeze lifted up the scarves of their flowing shalwar
kameez
I could see hope haloing their brown cheeks.
I can still see
how they had sewn the broken patches of their lives
with the needles of their patience, resilience, and hard work
into shirts that men in the West paid for with a peck of dirt.
And now as the weight of greed collapses onto their heads,
squashing them to dust,
their hands still sew
and their hearts sing to lull the wailings
of their children, born and unborn, into a silenced song
that the world doesn’t care about, or stop to listen to
as we proudly march to work,
our clothes sewn with broken fingers and drenched
with the invisible blood
of the garment workers of Bangladesh.
THE SECRET OF HOA SEN
The eyelid of night lifted me onto a sampan,
floating among the humming lotus.
Hoa sen; my darling called out their name
so their perfume blossomed onto his lips,<
br />
unveiling the mist of a world
that I didn’t know existed.
The hoa sen swayed, shivered, breathless.
“Hold me,” he said, as if from another life.
When I reached for the world of his face,
I could taste our longing on his skin,
glistening with a new sun
rising between us.
Only the hoa sen
witnessed how I became
the flower
that trembled on the chest of light.
TWO TRUTHS
At Hà Nội’s Metropole Hotel, two men eat salmon
imported from Norway,
fresh oysters and beef from Australia, water from France,
sausages from Germany;
the plate-glass windows reflect them, and the waitresses
are dressed in ancient clothing, their hands folded in respect.
On the other side of the glass, a man fixes
bicycle tires for a living; his hope
throbs in the heat of summer’s midday.
A woman carries plain noodles on her pole
which she sells with tofu and shrimp paste.
They were all farmers once,
and now belong to two different truths,
with nothing between them except the thick plate glass,
and a stream of people crawling forward, in a hurry.
EARTH HOME
The roads bleed out their green blood until they’re pale.
Summer buries the sound of the cicada;
winter entombs the leaves.
I am bare on the concrete pavement—the cemetery of grass—
and sadness finds nowhere to hang.
Concrete, towering steel,
dust, thickening smoke.
In one gulp noise swallows the sun.
I put my hands to my face; I cannot recognize myself.
Rivers flow from forests which have died too young,
blood halos of red clouds;
humankind drowns itself with floods
rushing down bare mountains
where once proud trees
cling with their roots, crying out their fate.
Where young rice plants were green,
factory chimneys poke into the ribs of light.
A cancer descends, grows, and spreads from human greed.
Where can I hide, when I am chasing myself?
CERAMIC RHYTHM
White blue, blue white, carry me back to my childhood.
The narrow village lanes curve with my feet.
Golden rice straw, white clouds,
buds full of the emerald gardens to come,
cups of green tea, winding village lanes, tobacco pipes
that bring tears to my eyes.
Crystal clear human voices
scoop me into the gulp of the village well,
embrace me into the heart of the village of Bát Tràng.*
Human hands blossom into ceramic flowers:
white blue, blue white, four seasons spread out soft silk.
Sing to me the lullaby of vast ceramic rhythms.
* Bát Tràng Village, located thirteen kilometers southeast of Hà Nội, is famous for its ceramics for the last thousand years. Blue and white are two distinctly traditional colors of Bát Tràng ceramics.
THE WHITE TIME
In winter’s drizzling rain, in the cicada song
born out of summer heat,
I find him
standing patiently as an exclamation mark
amid the crowded stream of vehicles,
people getting stuck in their own hurry.
He is alone, silent and small,
time flowing through his palms.
I buy a motorbike taxi ride.
He takes me, unconcerned about the price.
It seems he only wants someone to hear his voice,
struggling to emerge above the high-rise towers, above the music
spewing from bars,
overcoming the hoots of vehicles
that people aim at each other as if at war.
I sit on the back on his motorbike,
listening to his story,
listening to the wind of Trường Sơn Mountains
blow through his hair
streaked with white,
listening to the Central Highlands’ sun
sing on his bony shoulders,
and to bullets, cutting through the days before I was born.
The old soldier
brings faraway raindrops to my eyes;
the rain carries with it the sweetness of victory,
the bitterness of the faraway war
where he permanently carved his name,
and the saltiness of his worry: who will remember Trường Sơn,
and the sharpness of daily life rushing around me
as if knowing only how to reach forward,
to the front
where everyone looks ahead,
so forgetful,
forgetting,
the soldiers and their stories that need to be told.
Forgetting,
the small soldier in the middle of the noisy, crowded city
next to the crossroad, time, whitening through his palms.
WITH A VIETNAM VETERAN
For BW
We sit opposite each other,
a dewy curtain of hatred
replaced by the smoke screen from two steaming bowls of phở.
He sweats like a Vietnamese in the tropical heat,
like a Vietnamese he raises his chopsticks.
The war has never stopped.
He has never forgotten the war,
and each night he must survive his own dreams.
He stays quiet,
traffic noise making waves from all four sides,
rocking us between present and past.
He can’t explain the reasons for the war,
the reasons why my relatives had to fall,
and why so many children are imprisoned
in the pain of Agent Orange.
If he told me, I would not be able to touch the funeral whiteness
that has bleached his hair, and carved into his features,
sinking me deep into a bottomless, twirling tunnel.
On the nearby TV screen, another war is alive;
only an arm-span away from us, death is opening its mouth,
snatching and gobbling down lives;
only an arm-span away from us.
Only an arm-span away.
SEPARATED WORLDS
Graves of unknown soldiers whiten the sky.
Children looking for their fathers’ graves whiten the earth;
rain tatters down onto both of them.
Children who haven’t known their fathers’ faces,
fathers who live the lives of wandering souls,
their shouts to each other buried deep in their chests,
yet through more than thirty years, the shouts stay alive.
Tonight I hear their footsteps
coming from two separate worlds;
the hurried, trembling footsteps
finding each other in the dark;
the footsteps sucked dry of blood,
lost through millions of miles,
lost through thousands of centuries.
With each footstep I place in my country,
how many bodies of wandering souls will I step on?
How many oceans of tears
of those who haven’t yet found the graves of their fathers?
* The Vietnam War ended nearly forty years ago, yet hundreds of thousands of families are still looking for the remains of their loved ones.
APRIL
I touch my lips onto April,
startled when April’s lips are the red gạo flowers.
Trembling, the buds deliver themselves to the horizon,
but no one’s there, so
scattered, they fall.<
br />
I pick them up and bring them home
to ferment a dream for myself,
tinted the color of fire.
I touch my hands onto April,
astonished when April’s flesh is the green rice fields—
and the sharp velvet rice leaves cut my hands to bleed.
I stuff the sweet fragrance into my shirt—
to ferment these sombre dreams for me.
I touch my chest onto April,
and tottering, April’s heartbeats
breathe the wind’s wandering words into my blood,
to ripen love in my veins.
I look up into April,
and April’s tears cry into my eyes,
rain of the forgotten winter.
The summer rain stretches its feet across the watery fields.
I bundle the drops into my soaked hair—
make a dream of a far journey for myself.
April blossoms,
with red-gạo-flower-lips.
THOUSAND YEARS
Wait for the green of trees to disappear into darkness,
for the motorbike and car horns to sleep tight behind doors,
for worry to shut behind the eyelids,
for the day’s turning wheel to stop,
The Secret of Hoa Sen Page 2