August 2022
Bio Note: I served as Wisconsin's Poet Laureate several years ago, and keep trying to remind myself that these— while certainly not the best of times— may not the worst of times, either. I wrote the following poem following a visit to Viet Nam and Cambodia about fifteen years after that disastrous war ended. Its tragic consequences were clearly still in evidence at that time, and remain so today. May the world continue to heal.
The Blue Water Buffalo
PHNOM PENH, Jan. 28 2020— Cambodia recorded 77 landmine
and unexploded ordnance (UXO) casualties in 2019, up 33 percent
compared with 58 in the year before.
—Xinhua News Agency
On both sides of the screaming highway, the world
is made of emerald silk—sumptuous bolts of it,
stitched by threads of water into cushions
that shimmer and float on the Mekong's munificent glut.
In between them plods the ancient buffalo—dark blue
in the steamy distance, and legless
where the surface of the ditch dissects
the body from its waterlogged supports below
or it might be a woman, up to her thighs
in the lukewarm ooze, bending at the waist
with the plain grace of habit, delving for weeds
in water that receives her wrist and forearm
as she feels for the alien stalk, the foreign blade
beneath that greenest of green coverlets
where brittle pods in their corroding skins
now shift, waiting to salt the fields with horror.
©2022 Marilyn Taylor
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL