The Secret of Hoa Sen Read online

  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,