The mother runs towards us,
the names of her children fill her eye sockets.
She’s screaming “Where are my children?”
The mother runs towards us,
her husband’s name carves a hole in her chest.
She is screaming “Return my husband to me.”
Time fades her shoulders.
Her ragged hair withers.
Sky spreads sunlight, dragging me along the roads
carpeted with bomb craters like the eyes of the dead,
wide open, staring.
The dry, cracked fields struggle to find their breath.
Flamboyant flowers shed their blood along the road.
Still so deep the wounds, Quảng Trị.
* Quảng Trị was one of the bloodiest battlefields during the US-Vietnam War.
VN ANH
I go,
leaving you behind in the sprouting spring.
Tulips grown in your garden this season
blossom into Van Gogh’s Autumn Night.
I leave,
the street turns,
the sunlight hesitates,
and the afternoon is tilting.
The Hà Nội autumn road’s uneven,
leaves fall on ancient footpaths.
Your mother, father, and sister are there,
waiting through each season of falling leaves
for anyone’s footsteps, as if you would return.
The grass on Houten’s dike was green like the green of Hà Nội,
and Houten’s sky blue like that Hà Nội blue.
I don’t know why they will not merge into one,
why one does not exist in two.
One day is as long as one life in the visitor’s journey.
You and me, two people from different places,
our palm lines meet somewhere far from home.
Destinies divide us into two halves,
one half at the land of our husband’s, one half at home.
We meet in our mother-tongue.
Wandering’s blood flows upwards to our source.
But I have to go, while you stay back,
autumn sun thinning and fragile.
THE SINGING SEA
Men go out to sea in pairs.
Women go out to sea orphaned, alone.
—Vietnamese folk poetry*
You’re about to become a mother,
about to cross the sea alone;
the dry sea, waves pushing hard, waves of nothingness,
overflowing, trembling, bottomless waves.
You will face yourself
and the storm of pain,
suddenly in fright
when sunrise breaks,
when the angel cries out her first cry.
Your baby: ten fingers, slim and pink, ten toes
flowering, thirsty lips looking for you.
Chest hungry for heartbeats that find their way to your heart.
Your baby’s closed eyes open up the blue sky of paradise.
Your baby’s tiny soul revives this miraculous world.
There will be no more pain, no more dry sea,
only you and your baby at peace.
And the rhythm of sunrise’s breath
will flow the motherly love from your breasts to the baby’s lips.
Only you and the baby.
Only the baby and you.
You haven’t sung a lullaby,
yet the words of your mother will return to your lips
full and complete.
You will sing the lullaby to your child,
as your grandmother sang to your mother.
The lullaby is soft as waves.
The lullaby is easy as clouds.
And the sea is full again.
The sea sings
your words.
* In Vietnamese folk poetry, “women go out to sea” means to give birth.
THE GREEN SPHERE
I did not know there was such a river,
so fast running and passionate;
river who arrives at me
after so many winding mountains and whirlpools.
The river that pulls me into his freshwater arms,
the river that silts me with his pain, lifts me with his gentleness.
Oh my river,
I did not know I was the rice field during drought
until the river brought the song of joyful water, from far away,
flooding me with possibility,
so I may die, flowing into him.
STEPS OF TIME
For my mother
After countless journeys to connect the globe,
I bring you back to Hội An,
everything green as it was thirteen years before:
rows of green trees, the emerald Thu Bồn River;
only your hair has faded;
its white strands fly to blur my eyes.
I count the steps of time on the old brick wall,
the footsteps that crush human fates
into moss, discreet and quiet,
calling clouds to rain on us this afternoon.
You and I together in the middle of this town, so ancient
your shadow reaches out to protect me;
thirteen years, and countless journeys.
I have counted my life out with each sunrise,
and today, the sunset is within my reach,
so I know that when time turns me into moss,
your shadow will forever green above me.
YOUR WORDS
Your words are clouds
to rain down on the furrows of my skin,
eight-color flowers, flying and growing.
I have touched the sunrise with my hair,
soaked sunset with my tears,
still,
I cannot emerge from the earth
until the eight-color rainbow
blossoms,
on the body of a field, gold with wild daises,
to color me with your words.
Eight wings of the rainbow fly up,
calling a name.
The sound rolls into my chest,
leaving my lips tattooed.
NIGHT’S WHISPERS
You are sleeping
and night rests its shadow on your arms.
Moonlight tenderly hums;
the wind tells of peaceful seasons.
Stars dream in your eyes.
The galaxy sends clouds to safeguard you.
I will come, and I will be the tender grass,
spreading myself to sing you to sleep,
and I will grow myself into you, making us one.
YOUR FOREST
For my mother-in-law
On the other side of the ocean, your forest opens to welcome me.
The forest that gave birth to my husband, and raised him.
The forest that blessed him into my life
now reaches out to give me shade.
Your forest is full of flowers and fruit from all four seasons.
Flowers from the warm kitchen.
Flowers from slender hands.
Flowers from the days and months of patience and hard work.
Leaves tell me the story of your bare feet in the snow, walking to
school.
Leaves tell me the story of your back, bent from carrying the war.
Rows of trees with hollowed eyes
tell me stories about how you cried
when the leftover bomb in the forest
took your seven-year-old brother.
War makes human lives dwindle.
During those rainy days
we stay dry inside your forest.
After too many journeys, we come home, as if children,
to the fragrance of your kitchen fire.
BABYLIFT*
Lifted high, flung into another world,
another country, another embrace,
this was the fate of the bewildered children,
&
nbsp; their skin still fuming from the fire of their evacuation.
They come home, their hair not blond, their skin not white,
their tongues without Vietnamese,
but no diet of milk and butter can answer the thirty-five-year-old
question
Who am I?
No adopted arms can replace the parents’ embrace.
No DNA test can link them to their origin,
and black hair cannot think in Vietnamese.
Babylift. Over twelve thousand days of tears.
Over thirty-five years of pain,
and still the questions have their eyes wide open.
18/4/2010
* “Operation Babylift” was carried out during the last days of the American War in Vietnam. According to information from the American side, more than 3,300 children considered to be orphans were airlifted from the South of Vietnam in 1975, and were adopted in the US and several other countries such as Australia, France, and Canada. However, some of those children were not orphans and many have returned to Vietnam to find their birth parents, with very little hope.
GRASS
The fragrance of the bodies of mowed grass
fills the air.
No smell is sweeter than the wounds of grass,
a fragrance that lays me down to love
earth’s surface, imprinted with uneven patches.
Velvet grass grows into peace.
I dissolve into your color,
the speechless color of grass.
VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL
Birds’ song knocks on the White House;
Lincoln’s smile resounds;
sunset soaks Washington in deep red.
The black wall,
fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and sixty-seven names I don’t
know,
who fired gunshots into my mind,
their boot tips still drenched with blood.
I want to bury them once more.
Agent Orange flares up its color,
and the burning Phan Thị Kim Phúc*
runs out from the rows of names.
Black, silent,
the silent answer for thousands of questions.
A tiny rose lights up a sharp pain,
a letter dim with tears that someone wrote
for his dead father.
“Father, today is my daughter’s birthday. I wish you were here
to blow with her the birthday candles. There isn’t a day that
goes by without me thinking about you. Why, Father? Why did
you have to go to Vietnam? Why did you have to die?”
The rose petals wilt. Letters carpet below the Black Wall. Their
words flicker and bleed.
I hear from the gloomy earth
the sounds of American fathers
carrying their babies in their arms,
their eye sockets like bomb craters,
their hearts bullet holes. Agent Orange
lives in their bodies. Their blood
flows and drags their crying babies from their arms.
Every name on the black wall sinks into my skin
to become each face of the fallen Americans;
Washington this afternoon,
red sunset or tears?
* Phan Thị Kim Phúc is the child subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972, by photographer Nick Ut. The photo showed her running naked and crying, after being severely burned by napalm.
THROUGH A NARROW LANE
I wait for the sun to swallow my thoughts whole,
for the moon to light on my palm.
We make our way through a narrow lane,
try and fit our bodies perfectly into each other in the darkness,
try and fit our lips perfectly into each other to carry us through
the winter.
My scarf wraps around the wind; I wrap around you.
Inside of night the sun flows; inside of day, the moon.
You flow inside of me,
and swallow all my thoughts whole.
You put the moon into my palm.
I open my eyes after the kiss;
we’ve passed together through the narrow lane.
SONG OF GARBAGE
When the city sinks deep into its sleep,
the world of garbage bursts into life.
Vegetables who can’t rot through their formaldehyde skins wail.
Babies aborted from their mothers’ wombs
compete their voices with those of insects.
Liquor bottles
swear in their drunken language.
Manuscripts shout at each other in jealousy.
Promises torn to pieces, still preach loudly.
There are women who sit in the city’s garbage dump
to gather, collect, and mend their lives whole from debris.
HIMALAYA
At four thousand meters in the Himalayas,
I define myself as a green dot.
Birds’ song
anchors me on the mountain slopes.
I surge with the waterfall,
I am vigorous like the forest.
Time ponders,
oversleeping on the leaves.
I am with
Himalaya.
I am unknown, yet the forest is a thousand years old.
I am barren, yet the forest overflows with streams.
Waves of mountains, to where do you carry me?
Words wander,
hammocking themselves in the midst of a green nothingness;
graceful, fragile,
the forests shed their clothes, revealing the emerald green.
The essence of stone blossoms into clouds,
eagles flap their wings,
the sun sets.
Mountains grow into clouds;
Himalaya, one day
I lock my hastened journey,
entrusting the key
to flying clouds.
Bhutan—Himalaya Mountains
1/5/2009
FISH SAUCE AND FLOWERS
In my mother’s kitchen, fish sauce and flowers sweetly fragrant,
the aroma of free schools of ocean fish
who swim to the vase of roses, still soaked with morning dew.
My mother cooks for me with the aroma
of freedom and the freshness of beauty;
slices of fragrance woven from her chopsticks,
and each slice offers to become a world
from my mother’s own slim hands.
BLUES FOR MY GRANDMA
On this night at Lancaster, the sky is so blue and deep
I suddenly see the river of our village
winding through clusters of stars.
Above the dome of blues,
I see you, kneeling by the river of pain and loss.
Your hands curve into a nest,
holding my newborn mother to the chest of light.
I hear the rice plants where you lay buried sway,
rustled by the seventy years
between my life and your death,
and across the distance of tens of thousands of miles,
I feel the rice plants take root
in your thirty-year-young bones,
and rain down on me, on the other side of the ocean,
the fragrance of freshly cut grass.
I take another deep breath,
and your dreams rise inside of me;
your lullabies blossom on my lips
so I sing the stories of our ancestors.
I sing about the beauty of the thirty-year-old face
war had snatched away from us
but that I can now hold in the heartbeat
of this blue Lancaster night.
CRYING FOR MINDANAO
For the hundreds of Filipinos who perished by Typhoon Bopha that hit Mindanao, Philippines on 4/12/2012
My housekeeper Nerissa Becada is the one who
told me about
Davao’s flash flood
that pulled the lives of hundreds of her countrymen into thick
mud,
and sucked them dry of their last breaths.
She stood there next to the kitchen sink, holding a knife with
which
she was about to chop a lovely fish into my sumptuous dinner.
She did not cry, but I saw her voice tremble
as she told me about the thin bodies of children covered with
mud,
about the wind that crashed into villages too far away for
outsiders to reach,
about the first six trucks of rescuers, swallowed by landslides,
and about hundreds of village men and women
The Secret of Hoa Sen Page 4