Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag
By Bruce Weigl
Because this evening Miss Hoang Yen
sat down with me in the small
tiled room of her family house
I am unable to sleep.
We shared a glass of cold and sweet water.
On a blue plate her mother brought us
cake and smiled her betel-black teeth at me
but I did not feel strange in the house
my country had tried to bomb into dust.
In English thick and dazed as blood
she told me how she watched our planes
cross her childhood’s sky,
all the children of Hanoi
carried in darkness to mountain hamlets, Nixon’s
Christmas bombing. She let me hold her hand,
her shy unmoving fingers, and told me
how afraid she was those days and how this fear
had dug inside her like a worm and lives
inside her still, won’t die or go away.
And because she’s stronger, she comforted me,
said I’m not to blame,
the million sorrows alive in her gaze.
With the dead we share no common rooms.
With the frightened we can’t think straight;
no words can bring the burning city back.
Outside on Hung Dao Street
I tried to say good-bye and held her hand
too long so she looked back through traffic
towards her house and with her eyes
she told me I should leave.
All night I ached for her and for myself
and nothing I could think or pray
would make it stop. Some birds sang morning
home across the lake. In small reed boats
the lotus gatherers sailed out
among their resuming white blossoms.
Hanoi, 1990
Copyright Credit: Bruce Weigl, “Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag” from Archaeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Bruce Weigl. Reprinted with the permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc., www.groveatlantic.com.
Source: Archeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems (Grove/Atlantic Inc., 1999)