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Bonny Cassidy

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Bonny Cassidy

Bonny Cassidy is completing a PhD thesis on the poetry of Jennifer Rankin and Jennifer Maiden at University of Sydney. Her poetry has been published in various journals and anthologies, and her first libretto will be performed as an opera in June. In 2008 Bonny will be undertaking a residency in Japan supported by AsiaLink and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. Bonny co-edited The Salon Anthology: New Writing + Art (Sydney: non-generic, 2007) and works as Chief Researcher for The Red Room Company.

 

 

The mourner

His right foot drags an affected waltz
as if the way back lingers behind –
to a time of still
before he were wiser –
a time that comes after
death, after knowledge.
His legs snap shut. Only
the mules fill the cone of dust
before the next heave forward.
They bungle right through it on the double,
and he imagines animals alone
must own that frosting time,
always between one step and another.

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Jill Chan

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Jill Chan

Jill Chan was born in Manila, Philippines. She migrated to New Zealand in 1994. She has two books of poetry: Becoming Someone Who Isn’t (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2007), and The Smell of Oranges (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2003). Her work has been published in Poetry New Zealand, JAAM, Trout, Takahe, Brief, Blackmail Press, Deep South, Southern Ocean Review, foam:e, MiPOesias, Tears in the Fence, Blue Fifth Review, Asia and Pacific Writers Network, and many other magazines.

 

 

Body

There was a woman who wore nothing but silences. All the men would bring their words to her, make her dream
without sleeping, next to the loudest scream. How each of them would pronounce their words like a body running
into language, full weight of vowels and purse of lips.

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Maria Freij

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Maria Freij is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle where she also teaches. Her theoretical work focuses on literary representations of melancholy, place, and identity. She is also interested in translation between English, Swedish, and French, especially of poetry. Maria has presented her work in Australia and Europe and her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in journals and anthologies. Her collection, I Was Here, won the University’s Harri Jones Memorial Prize in 2007.


Kindergarten (I)

The child’s breath appears
and disappears on the window-pane.
Beyond the reflections
of the others playing catch
and the smell of orange and clove
lies the forest with its secrets.

Shadows join deeper shadows,
melt with the tree-trunks,
sweep away the toys left in the playground,
the stray mitten.

The sweet odour of sweat and wool
blends with the sound of the ticking clock,
the voices of parents collecting their children,
the bitter taste of orange peel on fingertips.

No one notices when the child falls
through the reflection of her own eyes.

She finds herself standing
in the middle of the yard.
All is quiet;
the sky is a black bowl
over her head.

In the air,
snowflakes hang suspended
like promises.


Kindergarten (II)

This is the same spot where, last summer,
you collected tiny frogs in buckets.
Frail lives:
delicate legs and sticky eyes.
This is the same spot
where the girls shrieked in pleasure
when cold little feet touched their palms.

The boys collected more and more
until the sun set behind the pines
and the air turned cool and wet.
This is the same spot
where they sometimes found a toad
and beat it to death with a rock.

The air smells like it is about to snow.

Last year’s air is trapped in the crystals of ice
that form in lumps of moist, aerated earth.
Inside, your history shines in the sharp light.

You look inside:
see yourself walking to kindergarten in the dark,
being collected in the dark,
the soft toy that went missing in the forest,
the silence at the dinner table,
water tracing the outline of an icicle.

The flat rock burns white before you,
its surface smooth like a skull.

Spears of ice whirl through the air
as the other children throw the porous chunks
into the rock face. You, too, lift your hand.


Kindergarten (III)

Monday afternoon: playtime.
Long johns, socks, trousers,
shirts, sweaters, scarves,
mittens, bonnets, jackets.

The sun has already fallen
behind the red shed; the roof’s ridge
is alight for one more minute.
Always this sense of urgency,
of having to savour the light.

Too late.
The fire goes out;
the drifts turn blue;
wind blows the snow into waves.

Under heavy layers of down
the children play hide-and-seek in the half-light,
stand still in the shadows.

When you turn your back,
the shadows break free from their objects
and dance over the snow like birds.


Amber

How many times has she been to this beach? When she was a child, she used to come every day. Countless times she’s walked by the water’s edge trying to find an amber bead lodged in the wrack after a stormy night. She turns the seaweed over with a stick: a cloud of sand flies, some wet feathers, bleached bones. The air fills with the scent of stale water and rotting wrack. No pearls. Every day the newspaper reports findings of large chunks of amber, with mosquitos, bugs, rainbow-coloured beetles trapped inside. The jeweller on the corner polishes the amber into art. The girl presses her face against the window but never steps inside the shop. At night, she is a spider scurrying down a tree-trunk. She cannot seem to move fast enough. The drop of resin, like a ball of lava, catches up with her. She strikes a pose. Today, the ocean is calm. She swims one hundred and eleven breaststrokes just like when she was a child. She spreads her towel, lights a cigarette. On her back in the sand, she closes her eyes. The insides of her eyelids burn like amber.

 

Mark Tredinnick

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Mark Tredinnick is a poet, essayist and writing teacher; he lives in Burradoo, in the highlands southwest of Sydney in Australia’s southeast. His books include The Little Red Writing Book (published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2008 as The Cambridge Essential Writing Guide), The Land’s Wild Music and A Place on Earth. His landscape memoir, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Green Grammar Book will appear in 2008. Mark is also at work on a volume of poems and a book about the consolations of literature in a frantic age. Mark’s prizes include The Newcastle Poetry Prize, The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, The Calibre Essay Prize, The Wildcare Nature Writing Prize and shortlistings in major awards, including The ABR and Broadway Prizes. His writing (poems, essays and criticism) has appeared in many books and anthologies, in Best Australian Essays, and in Australian and overseas journals and newspapers including Island, isotope, Orion, Manoa, PAN, Southerly, The Sydney Morning Herald. He has written regularly for The Bulletin.

In recent years, Mark has edited a number of collections of Australian writing, each published as a special issue of a literary journal: Where Waters Meet (Manoa18:2, with Larissa Behrendt and Barry Lopez), Watermarks (Southerly 64:2, with Nicolette Stasko), and Being True to the Earth (PAN 4, with Kate Rigby). He has taught landscape writing, creative non-fiction and poetry at centres in the USA and at The University of Sydney.

Photographer :Tony Sernack


Urban Eclogues
I

Adrift in the middle of my years, I sit in a corner and drink. I eavesdrop
a tableful of girls romancing their cell phones, workshopping
love’s abstract particulars.
Football plays on the big screen;
I listen like a thief in case the women know the score.
But I never could tell. At fulltime I walk home like a motherless child.

II

Witness is a solitary game. There isn’t a thing I have left to say
but back in my room I ring like a singing bowl,
empty and unable to stop.
You’re in nine kinds of pain, my friend; you know
the twenty-seven strains of despair. And your lovely hair has fallen.
The moon at my window is a rusted shot, caught in its corrupt trajectory down.

III

The world was always someone else’s oyster, a metaphor
I never could prise open.
All I’m good for tonight
is to let the night pass,
while beyond me the world peters and my friend fights beautifully
like a trout on God’s line. The usual idiots are still in power. But they’ll keep.

 

Two Hens

Make prayer at the concrete trough
beneath the dripping tap. Flush now with summer
the water poplars graze a slow benediction
over the birds, and a miser’s rain falls through the
morning.

From my desk I look out on this
epitome of good fortune and pray for more

rain. The weather has turned. It will do that
if you wait. The wind is in the south
and the leaves of the poplars shiver silver
as though something that was wounded is now healed.

These past days have tried and found me
wanting, and I have almost failed, but here

I am, still who I always was,
only more so. The days you love are not
the days that prove you. Winter is my weather;
I grow by waiting. And there is no end

of the dying one did not know
one had yet to do to one’s self.

But you’ve had days like these. I envy
the hens the steady circle of their days,
but this is not how mine go; I am strung from stars
that once were gods and can’t seem to forget.

 

Plenty

Dandelions break out like lies in the grass. There’s an election
in the wind and promises on the table beneath the poplars and even the weeds
look good in the spring. But not far west
crops fail in their red fields
and rivers wither into memory. The future fails and the economy blooms
its profuse abstractions. What will the children eat when the wheat no longer rises?

 

And You

One child learned to walk
the day another learned to drive
and in between sixteen years ran before they could crawl
me any closer to who I’m meant to be
by now. November’s fallen back into winter. All day long on the roof
the rain writes the only script there’ll ever be for any of this.

God delivers when you stop
praying. The music starts when you stop
playing so hard and listen.
Some good came along today when I was busy hoping
for nothing, sweeping the cowshed instead and putting things off.
Want only the rain to fall and your children to find out for themselves.

Oh, it’s way too late now
to hope to say anything new.
All the music and all the meaning there ever were
have been here all along, and you may catch some –
but you mustn’t try too hard – between your child’s first steps, between
downpours, between the sweeping judgments of the broom.

The way Nan walks the lane
morning and evening behind her dog,
each step sounding one year of the ninety
she has seen; the way the black ducks land like tardy extras
on the rainy grass at dusk – enactments that say something I’d like my life
to say. Something the weather says, my children say, and you.

 

Rob Walker

Written by mascara on . Posted in Poetry.

Rob Walker

rob walker’s first full collection micromacro (Seaview Press) was delivered in 2006 after a twenty year gestation period. He’s published online, onpage, onradio and onCD. His latest chapbook is phobiaphobia – poems of fear and anxiety (Picaro Press). He moved to Himeji, Japan in January 2008.

 

 

 

cello

we drift
into sleep. my hand
an explorer wandering
your familiar valleys and
mountains playing the
xylophone of your
back. you are a cello
my hand languid
draped on
your
waist
for
an
8
bar
rest

 

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Thanh Thao

Written by mascara on . Posted in Featured Poet.

A poet and sports reporter, Thanh Thao was born in Quang Ngai Province, grew up in Hanoi, took a degree in literature from Hanoi University, and now lives once more in Quang Ngai. He was a correspondent for Vietnamese Army Radio in the Southern campaign of the war with the United States.   He became famous for his long antiwar poem “A Soldier Speaks of His Generation,” which was sent directly from the heat of battle to his hometown newspaper in the North. He is a member of the Vietnamese Writers Association and poetry committee and president of its branch in Quang Ngai province. Even though this position usually comes with Communist Party membership, he is not a member, the first such exception in history.   Winner of the National Prize for a Lifetime Contribution to Literature in 2001 and two National Book Awards—for The Footprints Passing a Meadow in 1979 and the book-length poem The Waves of the Sun in 1996—he is one of the most popular contemporary poets in Vietnam. An admirer of the Russian poets Boris Pasternak and Sergei Essenin and the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, Thanh Thao has grafted the early modernist style of western lyric to his own. The publication of individual poems in the 1970s and his collection The Rubik’s Cube,1985, stunned the quiet world of Vietnamese poetry. He has published at least fifteen poetry collections and several other literary works.

The following poems are translated by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover and will be anthologised in a collection of Contemporary Vietnamese Poets called Black Dog, Black Night forthcoming in 2008 by Milkweed Editions.

 

Suddenly

suddenly
his face turned to the past
turned to a sigh
turned to hopelessness

suddenly
without apology
a man flew through the treetops
leaving behind a woman, a thin trail of smoke

suddenly
the ships searched for a place to rest
the stars searched for a place to be seen
crowding into a puddle of water
where it gives birth to the sky
suddenly
as the poems searched for their flames

March 12

comes a faint sound of women selling rice cakes
on my birthday
it makes me remember
a packet of rice
a bowl of dried sweet potato mixed with molasses
a mother thin as the morning light
and laughter beside a heap of trash

now I have become my thoughts
and love what I lack

on my birthday a boat floats to an empty space
a lonely street in which some leaves are rolling
a wood-burning stove is poked, its fire like a whisper,
echoes from fifty-six years ago
a day as pale as today
that no one cared about, no one remembered
a little puppy is dumbstruck looking at a lonely street

a boy with country blood was born in a town
in a quiet time before the storms and flames
it was a childhood rippling with dragonfly wings
and fireflies whispered at night
in front of the house, the river where I had swum since I was six
not with an otter’s skill
but in the natural way of kids
to sink or to swim

2

fifty-six stairs
some of them weepy and some with hiccups
I have almost forgotten them
like a fisherman with the fish netted

3

how can I burn fifty-six candles
in the wind
if only in my life I could save a single one of them
but I blow them out instead
impossible!

This poem first appeared in New American Writing 23

 

Andante for the Millennium (2000)

I

When I circle myself,
the way a dog marks its place by pissing,
that’s when I break through,
because the high trees are calling,
the stars loudly call,
small bits of nothingness whisper,
a colorless beam of light
passes into my mind,
a woman pushes a trash can as if beating the drumhead of evening.
These are signs to me
to quickly clean up my mind,
be on time collecting the trash,
put the all away in the all,
to be perfectly clear.
That’s the time,
as a star disappears,
when word after word appears.

II

The wind blew me
a sideways look.
I crouched like a mimosa
looking at its thorns
which are the tears of a tree
gazing at a dump where the moon is bright as milk.
A festival of dogs
barks at the moon and laughs.
They can smell tragedy,
call out with the same emotions
of those who search the night –
a job, a hope, a refuge,
an
emptiness,
all that the dark night promises.

III

With two pens,
two chopsticks,
I’m going to look for the source of water
slowly and quietly.
Look, the pen is a little nervous,
breathing with every stroke.
I know I’m in a drought;
go slowly and silently.

IV

When I was young,
I spent my time like rain sinking into sand.
Now I add leaf to leaf
on the branch,
save a box of matches to keep warm in winter.
The old box can’t be recognized by its cover.
In childhood I held a black cricket.
Now at five in the morning, a kid is learning to walk on crutches,
a truck vomits black smog into the new millennium,
a mentally ill woman with amnesia runs beneath a street light,
behind the sunrise
the mayflies cease for a moment
all their searching and finding.

V

I already know
that other worlds
are no different –
a bird that tries to love its cage
has no need to begin singing.

 

Untitled

Up and down a fishing rod
to fish dreams of the past,
the dreams
of snatching shadows from under the green sadness
of water hyacinths.
I come again to my father and mother’s home
where a newly planted yellow plum suddenly blooms
like a spotlight on a flood plain,
like my mother’s eyes
staring from the garden’s corner
where custard apple has a pure greenness.
I come again
to the well,
its perfectly rounded sky,
and the tree’s oblique shadow
like my mother’s shape,
the faint sound of bells
and the rainy bells of the leaves
twinkling as they watch me;
childhood’s crystalline cloud
drifts.

I’m silent as a coconut palm
that doesn’t know why it bore fruit!

 

To Suddenly Remember

like someone beating a drum, the rain dropped on my waterproof army poncho
which was torn and badly needed mending
my friends were like forest trees, diminishing day by day
the war cut them down
like an electric trimmer
but now they’re all at peace
I remember also that evening, as a child,
the sweetness of the banana in my mother’s hand,
even sweeter when she carried me on her back!
the road over the dike echoed the soul of the river
dark brown sails and bamboo shadows floating slowly
a bridge where an older man got tired
and lay down to rest but not sleep
the room where he keeps only the barest necessities
the ripe smell of bananas
some old chairs
and a small ancient teapot
the aged sunlight
an evening of summer rain
and the bomb’s echo from the Duong bridge that sounded like rolling thunder
my parents lived there in a home
a ten-square-meter country
but because of our greater home
my parents didn’t prevent me
from going into battle
not hoping for a brave death or “rainbow”
I’m the hand on a compass
that only turns toward our room
where everything is old

Note: In Vietnam, the word for “rainbow” also refers to an honor or glorious achievement.
This poem first appeared in New American Writing 23

 

MiMi

I

I saw you, Mi, run around the moon’s back
barking
you were the best of dogs
you could outbark all the shadows
had footsteps like clouds
you still console me on the hottest of days

II

when someone loudly calls my name
I always depend on your eyes
which were brown as the earth

III

when the wind was gathering wave after wave
and the light of sunrise waved up and down
you flew past on four feet
in a good mood on a sad day
your ears twitched gently toward darkness

IV

haven’t seen you on a staircase
haven’t seen you in the air
our home was suddenly vast
with the faintest sound of your steps
you moved through the walls

V

your muzzle rubs against my heart
the night bursts into tears

 

A Leaf

someday
a green tree will hand me a leaf
inscribed with unclear words
as we are closely related
lonely and silent at night
miserable by day
it will have something it wants to say
someday

 

Wave Oscillation

I

Following me are sad dreams
in which my dying mother’s face appears,
like nights of worry as the rough sea drones.
Mother, so lovely, where did you vanish?
How do I turn time back to the past? How?

II

For all of my life, two shade trees have consoled me.
Whose footsteps remain
on the village trail?
What lights are in your eyes now that the rain has cleared?
Now the small stain of a star rises deeply,
a horizontal line that separates two sufferings,
but still leaves the spicy, fragrant smoke of our stove
in the garden with its dark green banana leaves –
from morning to night you still walk back and forth there!

1988

 

And You Wake Me Up, Ginsberg . . .

And you wake me up, Ginsberg, where I sleep on a log like a dog that sometimes speaks in sleeping, waves its tail
and howls with smoldering anger. And you wake me up with an owl in front of a forest, a drop of morning haze,
the sound of a person on the street recovering his previous life, the wind shredding newspapers, a series of drafts
extolling the mass media, and a bicycle rolling and flickering on a hot day. And you wake up me, a suppressed
kid, a miserable, homeless man; all untruths are listed under my name; my success and prosperity are confirmed,
recycled most likely from waste. But no one can recycle the pain and tears, although they want to create literature.
You wake me up as roughly as a cop rouses a  beggar dreaming on a park bench, rubbing his eyes as he thinks
about dreaming another dream. The paths I have been walking, both long and short, are meaningless; however, I
wait and, while waiting, I sink into the newspapers, throwing word after word, all those miserable words, in
exchange for a few pennies by the never-green leaves. This summer is so hot; I’m really tired. But you wake me
up, Ginsberg, I stand up as the morning rises, a howling rises, the green of never-green leaves rises. We live
without limits, but who knows what is best to do in these heavy times. The howling in blood, the rebel cells, isn’t
strong enough to become a tumor, but it doesn’t matter. I know someone who gives people immortality pills or
secretly puts mines of expectation in their chests; they will make this world shiver before it sinks again in their
sleep. Their mission is like a fly in a bowl of soup. I’m sick; please turn the sunlight blue until it’s salvation. You
wake me up in time, which the sun confirms by raising its hands in my direction. And now I’m as immovable as a
dusty plastic sunflower.

1998

 

This Is Usual

You tell me that I’m melancholy, but what the hell is it if I’m healthy as you,
and what is your power based on?
In a rainstorm we hear the sound of sighing – we can’t say
what we think or try to say what we don’t know.

The river is as puzzling as breath; it decorates its voice.
You don’t talk, but the way you are silent
speaks more than speaking.
I have experienced many holes, many rains, which crash into the shade
through leaves and branches,
which are in shock.
I lean on time to catch the time that doesn’t run out.
To ignore the land is to be old, dry, lean, and thirsty.
You persuade me by lying down in my cocoon then searching
for a way home, looking calmly at a catfish that gives birth
at the top of a banyan tree
in the summer-fool-crazy rainstorm.

2004

 

A Journey

A daydream takes me; I go into the private darkness of light.
The darkness differs significantly from reality, but it is still the reality
of a cow chewing the sunset; on one side is the yellow sunrise, on the other the darkness of sunset –
the faint border between
reunion, separation, reunion.
We have lived by suddenly moving, freely and easily,
from this area to another.
The lonely one who travels only with his mind
on unending hallways
to meet relatives who passed away
is as happy as any tourist
with blocked views.

Please,
don’t dig any holes that will break my journey!

1994

The Goal

A truck. The dark, nasty night. Losing direction. Trying to climb down in order to climb up. Can’t see that
truck. Can’t see the way home. Fences. Strangers. Another truck. But not the one I was looking for. That’s
probably Truong Son. There must be another war. But no. The truck. My “brother” the driver vanishes. I’m
suddenly very confused. Can’t see the goal. Where do I go? The night is like a cocoon. Pictures flicker. There are
human beings, but I’m unable to speak to them. No way home. No address. A stair slopes increasingly
up. Slipping. Down is easier than up. Slipping down then vanishing. Trying to talk louder by remaining
quiet. Trying to speak without a sound. All that remains are the views skimming along in the side mirror.

1988

Note: Truong Son is the longest mountain range in Vietnam, running from north to south; along with the Ho Chi Minh Trail, it serves as the border between Laos and Vietnam.

 

If I Knew

Drawing the bow intensely then suddenly releasing. No arrow. But feeling little pain. Maybe the arrow secretly
shot back, but I don’t know. Sometimes I choke when I swallow something. Don’t know where it runs to. A heat
between my chest and my belly. I have been neither waiting nor expecting very much. But how come that arrow
still comes back? The darkness flows into secret corners. I crouch like a rock or root. Someone sits on me,
mumbles and spits then leaves. The night gnashes and grinds. I don’t want to be alone, to be the bare branch
waving alone, like a cow or buffalo waves its tail. I want to say something for someone. But no one is here, or
they are here but I didn’t know. Don’t know what to say. Everyone counts their steps on their own separate
path. The sound of counting makes it a path. I don’t know how to count or I count wrong. Do I have no path? Here
are the breaking lines on the dike where my self is flooding. Why do I stand on the bank of my river life,
frightened to jump into it, even just to get wet? Who doesn’t dare to swim doesn’t dare to sink!

1998

 

A Soldier Speaks of His Generation

The day we leave,
the doors of the passenger train open wide.
There’s no longer a reason for secrets.
The soldiers young as bamboo shoots
playfully stick their heads from the windows.
The soldiers, young as bamboo shoots,
in uniforms too big for them,
crowd together like tree leaves on the stairs between the cars.
The train whistles too loudly
And too long, as if broken,
like the voice of a boy who nearly has his man’s voice now.

In our generation,
that train whistle is a declaration.

The generation in which each day is a battle,
its mission heavier than the barrel of mortar 82
that we carry on our shoulders.
The generation that never sleeps,
that goes half naked and patiently digs trenches,
that is naked and calm in its thinking,
that goes on its way as the past generation has gone,
by ways various and new.

In the forest, names are quickly engraved on trees.
The canteens are engraved with the letters N and T.
Each backpack contains a uniform,
some dried fish sauce, and a small lump of steamed rice.
The camp’s woodstoves flame on the stone bank of a creek,
above which hang tall cans of sour soup
made from Giang leaves and shrimp sauce.
What we have,
we share,
share on the ground
completely.
To enemies, we spend all we have in battle.
To friends, we give until all we have is gone.
If you see that our skins are black from the sun,
our misshapen bodies seem older than they are,
and you can count the calluses on our hands
along with the war medals – still, nothing quite describes us.

Oh, the clearing in Dau forest with its dry, curved leaves!
Every footstep crackles like a human voice.
In the night as we march,
several fires suddenly flare on the trail,
our generation with fire in our hearts
to light the way to our goal.

One night when rain lashes on all four sides,
We’re in Thap Muoi with no tree to hide us.
As the swamp floods, we have to push our boats against the rising tide.
The horizon lies behind whoever drags himself ahead,
Silhouetted by the flash of lightning.

Our generation has never slept, walks every night in the flood.
Mud covers us thickly from head to foot.

So our voices are those of cowboys,
and our gazes are sharp as a thorn,
because the fire that can burn in a bog is the true fire.
When it flames up,
it burns with all of its strength.

What do you want to tell me in the hazy night, Quoc,
as you sing passionately the whole flood season?
The Dien Dien flower raises its hot yellow petals
like the face of a hand that sunlight lands and stays on.
Our country comes from our hearts, simply,
Like this Thap Muoi that need no further decoration
and is completely silent.
Stronger than any romance, this love goes directly
to any person
who doesn’t care about the limits of language.

Unexpectedly, I meet my close friend again.
We both lie down on a My Long trail,
on an army coat under the dark sky,
where just this evening a B-52 harrowed the earth three times,
where for several years the bomb craters are uncountable,
where I suddenly speak a simple dream:
“When peace truly comes,
I will go to trail number four, spread out a coat and lie down
completely satisfied.”
My friend gazes
at a star rising from a water-filled crater.
His eyes look so strange; I see
they contain both the star and the crater . . .

A vortex spins on the roof of an ancient forest.
The wind whistles a long time inside the empty shells of trees.
The bats flicker in and out of sight.
A flattened place in the cane grass smolders.

We have passed the limits of the dry season,
passed the rainy season, the long limits of the rainy season
when every night our soaked hammocks hang on Tram poles.
Our boats move across the river under the faint flares of the American army.
Sometimes, in awe of the skyline filled with red clouds at evening,
we forget we are older than we are.
Our feet walk in rubber sandals across a hundred mountains,
but our shadows never walk ahead of our futures.

Battles of come again in memory.
Rockets explode against the sky in a mass of smoke.
Our hearts beat nervously in our very first fight.
Our army-issue canteens smell as they burn
on the roofs of the trenches.
And the garbage cans lie strewn all around.
In the silence and deafness between two bombings,
a hen’s voice suddenly calls
from a small, ruined canal.

Our generation has never lived on memory
so we don’t rely on the past’s radiance.
Our souls are fresh as Chuong wind,
our sky the pure blue of a sunlit day.

The transport boats sail the crowded Bang Lang canal.
That evening rockets attack,
bending down the Binh Bat trees.
Sunset covers both banks like blood.
The canal turns white from the flow of toxic gases.
Suddenly I see my face on the water’s surface,
among those poisonous mists,
on which floats the Binh Bat fruit,
on which floats our breaking country,
and I see
also floating the faces of many people,
some of them friends and some I have never seen.
They are so very young
as they flicker along on the stream
into a distant meadow
on an endless evening.

They’re the people who fought here first,
twenty years ago as one generation,
and also the ones who will come later,
twenty years from today.

That evening
on the small canal
artillery attacks and flowing water.
How clearly you can see
the faces of
our generation!

1973

This poem was very controversial in Vietnam after it was published in Hanoi’s largest literary review, Van Nghe, and was prohibited by the government until 1988, when Vietnam reconstructed its economy and politics.

This poem first appeared in New American Writing 23

Giang is a wild vegetable, sour to the taste, which North Vietnamese soldiers used in soup.
Dau is a kind of tree commonly found in the forests of southwest Vietnam.
Thap Muoi is a swamp where one of the largest North Vietnamese army camps was located.
Quoc is a nocturnal bird that sings “quoc, quoc, quoc“; it also means “country.”
Dien Dien is a wildflower.
My Long is the name of a trail in Thap Muoi swamp.
Binh Bat is a kind of tree that can be found in Thap Muoi swamp.
Chuong is a kind of southwest wind.

 

Peter Boyle reviews Yuxtas, by Mario Licón Cabrera

Written by mascara on . Posted in Reviews/Essays.

Yuxtas (Back and Forth)

by Mario Licón Cabrera

Launch Speech by PETER BOYLE

7 December Sydney 2007

ISBN 9780949274205

Cervantes Publishing

I want to start by thanking Mario Licón for inviting me to speak at the launch of his new book Yuxtas. Ten years ago I first had the privilege of meeting Mario. He was living then in Little Comber Street in Paddington with Jennifer Green, Jenny who is in many of these poems. Not long after meeting Mario I was there at the funeral for Jenny, one of the many deaths that mark this book.

Meeting Mario meant being taken into a new world, the world of his passionate intensity for poetry. I had already read Lorca, Vallejo, Paz but Mario knew their work inwardly, with an intensity and depth possible for someone who had grown up inside Hispanic culture and inside the beautiful Spanish language. Mario’s readings of those poets, particularly Vallejo, captured their seriousness, their depth and resonance. As I’ll want to show later, the rich tradition of Lorca, Vallejo and Paz, of Hispanic poetry in general, is a strong presence in the present collection, Yuxtas. Briefly speaking, it is a tradition that sees poetry as above all a place of truth. In poetry “no hay mentiras,” “there are no lies”. “En esa mar, no se miente” – on this sea, there is no lying. Poetry is marked above all by simplicity, by directness, by standing in a place of truth, rather than by metaphors or embellishment. It locates the value of poetry within the tone, the simplicity, the purity, the immense openness with which we start, rather than the verbal dressing up of what we have to say.

Coming now to the book itself, I would like to talk about it in two parts. Reading the manuscript for the first time over the last few days, I saw it as falling into two parts. The first part contains many poems I was already familiar with − either from reading earlier drafts of them or because of their similarity to other poems of Mario’s I had read before. They are poems of places and landscapes, of moving between landscapes but also of moving between languages. In them Mario gives us the blessing of letting us see our world enlarged, enriched as two worlds are put together and the familiar realities of Australia are seen through a double language. The second half of the book is something else again. It was a new discovery for me, a real revelation. There you get these wonderful poems, poem after poem, intense confronting poems of death.

One of the many benefits of living in a multicultural country is that you have the possibility of seeing the familiar world around you in so many ways, seeing it as perceived through different worlds and different languages. So the first half of Mario’s book is largely arranged by pairings of places and landscapes. The Domain is set against Chichen Itza; Centennial Park against Chapultepec Park; Hill End is placed beside Hermosilla City. The technique enlarges our world, shifts our perceptions so we can see differently.

It is not only landscapes Yuxtas travels between but also languages. To give you an idea of how Mario glides between languages and uses the special richness of both Spanish and English, to transform the most everyday item or experience into something glowing with beauty and strangeness, I want to read a short poem from near the beginning of the book, “Un patio vecino/ A Backyard Nearby”. I’ll read it in Spanish first:

Como un pájaro herido una sombrilla
roja y rota flapea rodeada

por macetas quebradas y plantas muertas
todas tiesas y desnudas bajo la brillante luz seca.

Algunas sillas volteadas rodean una mesa
cubiertas con raídas bolsas de plástico negro.
En el tenderdero un gancho solitario (now the English words}
clings y clangs contra un brazo de metal.


A Backyard Nearby

A broken red umbrella flaps,
like a wounded bird,
surrounded by cracked pots and dead plants,
stiff and bare under the dry-bright light.
{what a beautiful evocation of the Australian light, the typical
light of a summer “the dry bright light”}
Around a table, upside-down chairs,
covered with ragged black plastic bags.
On the clothes-hoist a lonely cloth hanger
clangs and clings against a metal limb {contra un brazo de
metal).a metal arm.

I want to turn now to the wonderful moving elegies and poems of death that make up the last part of this book. Among the powerful poems in the second half of the book three that stand out for me are “Osario,” an elegy for the death of his father, “Volker Shüler Will’s Funerals” and “La Muerte Agradecida,” both about the death of his mother. These are tough, powerful poems. It is not easy to write about the death of one’s father or mother or wife. Anyone who is a writer or a poet knows that. Such hard things in life often flatten us completely, reduce us to silence. The tradition that sustains Mario here is one of simplicity, of honest directness, a tone of simple truthfulness. There are poems earlier in the book which show how this simplicity can work so strongly. An important element in this book is the presence of Vallejo with his vision of poetry as absolute truth, of speaking from a place where only the essential is left to be said. This can be seen in a very short poem from earlier in the book, “I hear/I read”:

I hear
rosellas
crying aloud.
I imagine
their bright
colours amid
the branches
shining under
the morning
sun.

I read
about a
young Mexican
bricklayer
who jumped
from the 6th floor.

Too poor
to help
his mother
and brothers.

Mario Licón identifies poetry as the force that makes it possible to stand in the presence of these fierce experiences of pain and loss and to continue. Poetry becomes a gift that enables us to be open to what surrounds us, open to those presences of our own dead and of the world. To read just a few lines from the poem “Tonight”:

Tonight I want to give thanks . . .
To poetry for giving me a pair of hands
with which I can greet the wind and touch
the faces of my beloved dead ones.

How is it possible to speak from within this space? By cultivating a simplicity, an honesty, a humility before the world. This is very much the legacy of the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo, a legacy there within the poetry of Mario Licón.

I will leave it to you to read for yourselves the long poems “Osario,” the wonderful moving prose poem “Volker Shüler-Will’s Funerals.” “La Muertre Agradecida,” the elegy for Jenny, for his brother. One can only imagine how difficult it must be to write of so many beloved dead ones, to be so deeply surrounded by the dead. Mario has enriched us all through these poems. I will finish by reading one of the shorter poems about death, a very beautiful poem with a delightful presence of life in it, “Cancion/Song.” I’ll read it mixing the Spanish and the English:

And how did Inez die?
Longing for love
longing for love
on her bed
on her bed.

And how did David die?
Murdered in prison
murdered in prison
by injustice
by injustice.

And how did Esperanza die?
Y como murió Esperanza?
Regando aquella flor
regando aquella flor
que tanto quería
que tanto quería
Watering that flower
watering that flower
that she loved the most

Y como murío Ilusión?
And how did Ilusion die?
Así como llegó
así como llegó
just as she arrived
just as she arrived
soñando
volando
dreaming
flying.

 

PETER BOYLE lives in Sydney. His most recent books are Museum of Space (UQP) and Reading Borges (Picador).