Bamboo Among the Oaks by Mai Neng Moua

Author:Mai Neng Moua
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-87351-655-6
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2009-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

The Last War Poem

I tell you, this is the last word for this war.

This little side war we were the center of.

There is no justice from poetry—

Any veteran can tell you that.

They want their land, their lives,

Their livestock back.

Grenade fishing in the aftermath of Phou Pha Thi

Has lost its novelty

To the man with a bullet fragment rattling

In his body, slowly tearing him apart.

Write, they tell me.

Write what?

We lost, we were forgotten, we are ghosts.

We are victims of fat tigers and foreign policy.

There is no Valhalla, only memories of Spectre gunships

There is no Elysium, only pleas for asylum.

This jungle is filthy.

There was shit. There was blood.

There were refugees

Who to this day cannot explain why they were the enemy

When the Communists came.

Their sons fought. Their brothers died.

Their uncles, maimed, were hauled screaming into the shadows of the PDJ.

Write, they tell me, so people won’t forget.

So someone will know.

Lift their broken bodies with my words, bring them out

And say we did not die in vain.

For every bullet hole,

Let there be a sonnet to stitch the truth back together.

For every eye gone blind,

Let there be something to take its place.

Something.

Anything.

How can you not have words for the war of whispers?

How can you not shout, now that the whispering is done?

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