The Secret of Hoa Sen Read online

  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