This is a poem I wrote the first time I went back to Viet Nam, 1996. I didn't write very many good poems there. The best one is probably the one I wrote about my family, but I'm not going to post that here. Too personal. This poem I wrote after I visited the site of the My Lai massacre, where innocent villagers were brutalized and murdered by American soldiers - and this was just the most publicized atrocity, there were others. I'm not generally a melodramatic person, I don't cry in public. But there, I just lost it. An overwhelming grief, so much so that I couldn't even really write a poem on it... the poem below doesn't even strike me as a poem, I don't know honestly what it is. I guess a manifestation of my grief. And it's graphic, because I didn't know how else to communicate the brutality of what happened there.- My Lai This place is filled with ghosts whose faces I can't place but whose tears I can still taste. I see pictures of you eyes flaring as your huts burnt down behind you like broken promises. Sister, when they held you down with their pincers of pale arms raped you with the barrel of an M-16, did they bother to look at your hands see the borders there, geography torn and weather worn? When they pulled the trigger, the muzzle still inside of you, did they see an entire world contained in those hands the hills curved down from the thumbs, mountains of callouses at the root of your fingers soft plains of your hands twitch and die? Brother, when they saw you shield your younger brother with your own body as bullets buzzed towards you like an unprovoked hive of hornets could they imagine that such an automatic unselfish act of brotherly love could be forgotten in a fight over a mango seed yet remembered in a wedding did they know that the shield of family love even when useless to stop bullets is thrown with the urgency of survivors? Child, when they sliced open your mother's stomach with a bayonet ripped you from her womb did they pause to wonder if, one day, you could have grown to just once do something as rare, simple, and important as pause for breath on a green hill the world rolling out like a dream beneath you thought to yourself what a beautiful world to live in? I don't know if you can hear me. Every time I think of what happened here I can't believe in no type of God I just hope that someday this world will learn to pick up its pieces so that you can rest in peace.

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