[POEM] Shrapnels Shards on Blue Water

Source: vn-gblf forwarded with permission. ... After I'd stared out the window long enough, I picked up a copy of Viet Magnet, a bilingual newspaper for the local Vietnamese community, and ran across the poem copied below. Maybe it was my vulnerable and generous mood, but reading this and thinking about my fine Vietnamese friends and what they lived through made my eyes sting with those hot tears that have little to do with grief or sadness. Chris Fox

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Shrapnel Shards on Blue Water

      by Le Thi Diem Thuy
	dedicated to her sister Le Thi Diem Trinh


everyday i beat a path to you
beaten into the melting snow/the telephone poles
which separate us like so many signals of slipping time
and signposts marked in another language
my path winds and unwinds, hurls itself toward you
until it unfurls before you
all my stories at your feet
rocking against each other like marbles
down a dirt incline
listen

ma took the train every morning
sunrise
from phan thiet to saigon
she arrived
carrying food to sell at the markets
past sunset
late every evening she carried her empty baskets
home
on the train which runs in the opposite direction
away from the capital
toward the still waters of the south china sea

once ba bought an inflatable raft
yellow and black
he pushed it out into a restricted part of water
in southern california
after midnight
to catch fish in the dark
it crashed against the rocks
he dragged it back to the van
small and wet
he drove us home
our backs turned in shame
from the pacific ocean

our lives have been marked by the tide
everyday it surges forward
hits the rocks
strokes the sand
turns back into itself again
a fisted hand

know this about us
we have lived our lives
on the edge of oceans
in anticipation of
sailing into the sunrise

i tell you all this
or tear apart the silence
of our days and nights here

i tell you all this
to fill a void of absence
in our history here

we are fragmented shards
blown here by a war no one wants to remember
in a foreign land
with an achingly familiar wound
our survival is dependent upon
never forgetting that vietnam is not
a word
a world
a love
a family
a fear
to bury

let people know
VIETNAM IS NOT A WAR

let people know
VIETNAM IS NOT A WAR

let people know
VIETNAM IS NOT A WAR
but a piece
of
us,
sister
and
we are
so much

more