- Moon O'er Mekong
-
- Moon of moist,
sticky breezes splashing humidity
- Against my face
- A silhouette of a
fishing boat speaking Vietnamese
- From the balcony
of the Foreign Correspondence Club (FCC)
- I sipped beer
with Robin in my eyes
- She spilled
Southern smiles describing what she liked about Cambodia
- Moon o'er Mekong
was one thing she had stored
- In the back of
her mind
- And the children
selling jasmine wreaths was another
- From the mountain
of Murphy, North Carolina
- She spoke of
childhood memories of violence that echoed my own
- The moon was
bright and circular
- The Mekong was
silvery and calm
- The cyclo
drivers waited for the foreigners to be done with their drinks
- Their dollars
would be worth more than a week of local peddling
- The small,
leg-less beggar always waited in front with a straw hat for
- Drops of mercy
and compassion
- A waiter called A'Boy
asked us about America
- Robin told him of
Murphy in night shawls filled with holes for stars
- Like that night
the Vietnamese tried to abduct fish from their riverbed
- Sleeping in mud
of timeless passing as feed for humans
- Subliminally, I
dived down to the cradle depth of the river
- In search of her
organic odor of death and birth
- With my hunger to
be filled with their wisdom of having seen
- So much
destruction
- Where was I in
the smiles and the delight of those sun-baked faces?
- Lost in
admiration for them and how they survived?
- Everything around
me turned into silence as I surged from the Mekong's
- Bottom to the
moon o'er it
- With Cambodia
floating in between.
-
- Copyright © by
Chath pierSath, 1999
- Khmer Voice Homepage Authors
and Their Works Table
of Contents Poetry New
Submissions