Nam, poem from a visit to Vietnam

 

In late 2018 and early 2019, I visited Vietnam. That visit, and its impressions on me, sparked this poem:

Nam            

          

Here in sweeping terrains

brushed by raindrop blizzards

in the rainy season. The gaps

between showers

are burnished

by a sparkly sun

 

Every night, i want to eat Pho

drink tea served at low tables;

Meandering, I try to touch socialism, feel its shape, but

everywhere, buildings owned by company or state.

What does socialism look like to my naked eye?

The bombs have fallen

and from the dragon’s mouth

there was fire ...

 

In stately cities

where do hungry eyes go

when the tourists have left;

near markets piled with clothes

how do they wrap their bodies

when the cold night bites...

 

And still, people from the villages

come closer, into

Hoiann, Dalat, Danang

and then drifting on to

the stately layered and pigeon-decorated domes

of Hanoi and SaiGon

 

The supply store sells

army gear

A reborn Jeep, still marked ‘US Army’

carts tourists (in floppy hats and

velskoene) to ancient wonders

 

In a land and time

far away

there were shadows and broken walls and craters

where bombs gouged the land

Now, this country and its sidewalks

in Hanoi, HoChiMin City, Danang

are lined with stalls:

t-shirts, small flags, fridge magnets,

bowls from coconut husks

nail clippers and lighters

glinting a red and yellow star;

A woman with twin baskets

balanced like the justice scales

   offering a French tourist a taste

   of pastries steeped

   in sweetened oil

 

Nam, rising from the smoke

from the ruins: from the angled shadow

of the B52 hulks that pervade the capital

from the crater at MiSon, from the red line

that cut its belly, seaming north and south

 

Nam Viet, walking the narrow passage

between elders’ nightmares & youths’ forgetting

and pathways between rice paddies &

eddying points for microchips

finding its place ....

 

Frank Meintjies