from the Tsunami Notebook
poems washed up from the sea of tears
mmmmmmmmmm“Have you wondered why all the windows in heaven were
mmmmmmmmmmmmmbroken?
mmmmmmmmmmHave you seen the homeless in the open grave of God’s
mmmmmmmmmmmmmHand?”
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmKenneth Patchen
Artifacts of Death
My beautiful son, baked black
home from the tsunami waters
where he and his brother, and some old farts
towed donated fishing boats
to villages who lost all.
They had 300 boats,
but they need only one now
because they lost most of their people.
The dead don’t eat fish.
Quite the opposite….
Thor shows me a collection, gifts from Acehnese survivors
an old war bayonet, used to kill many rebels.
His sweaty hand opens to show me tiger’s teeth.
He unfolds a plastic body bag, sees my eyes
and says, “Don’t worry mom, it’s never been used.”
I send my sons to Aceh; this is their school,
“Earthquake High,”
where the sea eats everything loved.
The Buddha sat under a tree, attacked by his own fear of death,
or fear of life,
until every sword that pierced his heart
became a flower.
He had it easy.
I immerse my children in annihilation.
They come home to show me what remains.
Is the heart indestructible?
Or, do we burnish it shiny, to the density of stone?
What kind of mother have I become?
I give them bitter learning and cruel medicine.
They come home and hug me.
To Love a Wife
Bang Hanafi had a wife. She visited his leaf-enhanced dreams
to tell him, where to find their baby daughter. She told him, to dig under a tree, by a shaft of sunlight, where she and the baby were waiting.
He led his few friends with picks, and an old shovel, to the deep mud.
When she was uncovered, he said she was beautiful.
“In her life she was black and thin. She had wished to be
plump, and white, and now she has grown big, pale. "I only wish I had some fragrant oil, to help her smell a little better.”
Loosing Trust in the Rainbow
He is not my most beautiful child,
this, last one from my body—
copper, copper, red, pink, rusty penny boy.
He is the child of the truest and unexpected
love of my life.
The love that rings in the bells of my body
and wakes me like an earthquake,
spills like water
from one flooded rice field to all the fields
freshly planted below.
A spreading deep green glass floor
reflecting storms.
In Aceh, I saw the end of the world.
The rainbow promise of a senile God, broken.
We can never fix it, or mend even one sorrow
by sharing grief or forgiving ourselves for still living.
Enough,
the bird still sings and I pray for my own children.
What Will Never Dry
On the beach at Meulabouh,
54 days after the tsunami,
I found a seaman’s hat
just coming ashore, home without the sailor.
Two twisted tricycles,
plastic torn from soup packages,
a little bit of hand crocheted shawl,
a boy’s shoe, size seven, with no sole.
A hermit crab, living in a perfect shell.
A rusty, broken, military tower, looking west.
The sun is setting upon a peaceful glass table top green and silver sea.
Behind me is a mass grave and a Mosque still standing.
God, what does that mean? In nearly every village,
and broken seaside city, the arched Mosques
with onion shaped copper crowns, still gleam in the day,
stand proud and mostly white.
The Indian Ocean tenderly sprays my face with his salty spit.
I am aroused by his breath in my ears, and so I walk forward a step
until I am wet.
He is warm, the temperature of tears.
ILLUST.: Beach garbage (above) from AP and Sulekha.Com;
