Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
Did they use bone and ivory,
jade and silver, for ornament?
Had they an epic poem?
Did they distinguish between speech and singing?

Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone gardens illumined pleasant ways.
Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,
but after their children were killed
there were no more buds.
Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.
it is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants; their life
was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.

White dawn. Stillness.      When the rippling began
    I took it for a sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors
    of salt, of treeless horizons. but the white fog
didn't stir; the leaved of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving.

          Yet the rippling drew nearer — and then
my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if
fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips
were drying and curling.
                  Yet I was not afraid, only
                  deeply alert.

I was the first to see him, for I grew
    out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed: the two
moving stems, the short trunk, the two
arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless
                              twigs at their ends,
and the head that's crowned by brown or gold grass,
bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
  more like a flower's.
                    He carried a burden made of
some cut branch bent while it was green,
strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this,
when he touched it, and from his voice
which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our
leaves and branches to complete its sound,
                        came the ripple.
But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me
    as if rain
          rose from below and around me
    instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:
    I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know
    what the lark knows; all my sap
          was mounting towards the sun that by now
              had risen, the mist was rising, the grass
was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them
deep under earth.

        He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:
          the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded.
Music! there was no twig of me not
                        trembling with joy and fear.

Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
                    came into my roots
                        out of the earth,
                    into my bark
                        out of the air,
                    into the pores of my greenest shoots
                        gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
He told of journeys,
          of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
    of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
deeper than roots…
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
              and I, a tree, understood words — ah, it seemed
my thick bark would split like a sapling's that
                        grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost wounds it.   
   
                          Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
    As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
    were both frost and fire, its chord flamed
up to the crown of me.

              I was seed again.
                    I was fern in the swamp.
                        I was coal.

And at the heart of my wood
(so close I was to becoming man or god)
    there was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,
          something akin to what men call boredom,
                                  something
(the poem descended a scale, a stream over stones)
          that gives to a candle a coldness
              in the midst of its burning, he said.

It was then,
          when in the blaze of his power that
                    reached me and changed me
          I thought I should fall my length,
that the singer began
              to leave me.      Slowly
          moved from my noon shadow
                                  to open light,
words leaping and dancing over his shoulders
back to me
          rivery sweep of lyre-tones becoming
slowly again
          ripple.

And I              in terror
                    but not in doubt of
                                  what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
              wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder —
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn. In the forest
they too had heard,
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand year's layers of dead leaves,
    rolling the rocks away,
                    breaking themselves
                                      out of
                                  their depths.   
   
  You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,
                    of the singing
so dreadful the storm-sounds were, where there was no storm,
              no wind but the rush of our
          branches moving, our trunks breasting the air.
                    But the music!
                                The music reached us.
Clumsily,
    stumbling over our own roots,
                            rustling our leaves
                                        in answer,
we moved, we followed.

All day we followed, up hill and down.
                              We learned to dance,
for he would stop, where the ground was flat,
                                  and words he said
taught us to leap and to wind in and out
around one another    in figures    the lyre's measure designed.

The singer
          laughed till he wept to see us, he was so glad.
                                        At sunset
we came to this place I stand in, this knoll
with its ancient grove that was bare grass then.
          In the last light of that day his song became
farewell.
          He stilled our longing.
          He sang our sun-dried roots back into earth,
watered them: all-night rain of music so quiet
                                        we could almost
                              not hear it in the
                                  moonless dark.
By dawn he was gone.
                    We have stood here since,
in our new life.
              We have waited.
                        He does not return.
It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost
what he sought.
              It is said they felled him
and cut up his limbs for firewood.
                                  And it is said
his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing.
Perhaps he will not return.
                        But what we have lived
comes back to us.
              We see more.
                        We feel, as our rings increase,
something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest
                                        leaf-tips
further.
    The wind, the birds,
                        do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
The music!

My wedding-ring lies in a basket
as if at the bottom of a well.
Nothing will come to fish it back up
and onto my finger again.
                    It lies
among keys to abandoned houses,
nails waiting to be needed and hammered
into some wall,
telephone numbers with no names attached,
idle paperclips.
          It can't be given away
for fear of bringing ill-luck.
          It can't be sold
for the marriage was good in its own
time, though that time is gone.
          Could some artificer
beat into it bright stones, transform it
into a dazzling circlet no one could take
for solemn betrothal or to make promises
living will not let them keep? Change it
into a simple gift I could give in friendship?