The war was over, in the land of the river

 

I thought of the butterflies today, bright shattered glass

 leaping from the road to hit against the red

 of my Khmer scarf

As we thundered through the jungle in our truck

 

I sat in class on a plastic seat, in America Now

with views of pines from closed windows

No longer perched on a pile of landmines

Defused, broken, abandoned, to eat my lunch

 

Cambodia when I remember it now

The conflict dried up

The children still maimed

Homeless dogs on dusty streets

 

 

Of the Killing Fields

There is small sign, if one cares to look

In the thickets of palm trees

Where white skulls sit still in the shade

 

This is no longer the country

Of death and decay

Where schools were prisons

And doctors knew nothing

 

Instead the land of the River

Spreads itself down tired

As if the war was a day of work now over

And goes to sleep in the shade

 

The fact remains however buried

That I am forever scarred

Those feeble traces of the Shadow Death

Coming through night and dream to meet me

 

Of colours and smells

Of sounds and loud voices

Raised and lowered like waves

I think when at last sleep reaches me

 

Cyclo drivers peddling

Ever faster on hard concrete

On the roads that the Kmer Rouge

Once marched down, guns triumphant

 

The soft sound of your padding footsteps upon

 Wooden floors in old guesthouses

Where little old ladies

Sit silent

 

Sitting with you, outside Tol Sleng

with open mangos held in dust coloured hands

As we eat, and laugh, even after seeing children’s writing

On the walls of the school, then prison, now shrine

 

Hammocks swing in the shade,

Sleepy buzz-cut soldiers

Of a New Country

Their guns held tight as infants

 

Plates of rice still steaming,

Whole courses of food,

Waiting beside a politicians family

As they laugh, baking in the sun

 

There is a pagoda now,

On the sight of the death pits

Many small levels inside

Stacked full of human skulls

 

Frozen glasses of beer,

Behind which lies the balustrade

Of the Foreign Correspondents Club

Where once the talk of death was heard

 

We walk there together, in my thoughts

Though you were never with me, in the land of the River

And if you had been, hand in mine,

The skulls in the pagoda would not haunt me now

 

above it all the sky

beneath it the mighty river

My Mekong, in dream

Holding a country, together

 

The Forgotten

 

Lonely rusting hulks resting on what once was prosperous

Baby birds in a nest of barely used bin bags and cigarette butts

Rocks left behind from the metaphorical glacier WE choose to travel on

While they growl No in silence.

Used up, Washed Up, get-a-job

Grey-fleshed and demanding that WE give,

Out of guilt or pity but never without cynicism

For who knows if

 The want of the blue–veined-silky-sweet -relief

is somewhere in the decaying mansion

of their consciousness?

 

Spring

 

Trees sprung, upwards

From mulch and decay

 

Ice receding, backwards from blue water

Buoys, white plastic, freed from entrapment

 

To bob alone and quiet, until

They are used again

 

By boats, and boys

In brightly coloured swim shorts

 

Soon though the still and sluggish

summer will be here,

Then fall of leaves

And crunching quiet

Before winter

Settles in once more