“À ơi,” the sweet voice of gentle Mother
Her lullaby warms even the mountains and rivers
Mother’s love is beautiful and pure
With fragrant hands, she opens thousands of history pages
O Mother, O Mother Vietnam
Your love’s in a thousand melodies of lullabies
You teach your children to be just and compassionate,
to remember their roots and heroic ancestry.
Vietnam’s like a sad river branch with many twists and turns;
The moon dimmed, the water murky, the poor people, the bloodsheds…
Now, Mother’s voice is low, deep and sad
The two abysmal dark regions, a single source of suffering
Gentle Mother with shining virtue like a mirror
Her Flower of Compassion grows in her children’s garden
Mother sings a wonderful lullaby
Mother sings a lullaby of Love of Flowers and People…

Translated by Vương Thanh

Lời ru Mẹ Việt Nam

À ơi! Lời ngọt Mẹ hiền,
Tiếng ru ấm cả ba miền núi non
Mẹ tươi lòng ngát như son
Tay thơm Mẹ mở ngàn trang sử vàng.
Mẹ ơi, Mẹ hiền ơi. Ơi Mẹ Việt Nam
Tình thiêng muôn sợi tơ (ơ) đàn Mẹ rung
Dạy con nghĩa núi, tình sông
Dạy con nhớ gốc, khơi dòng liệt oanh
Nhánh sông sầu mấy khúc quanh
Trăng mờ, nước tủi, dân lành máu tuôn
Giờ đây tiếng Mẹ trầm buồn
Hai miền u tối, một nguồn đau thương
Mẹ hiền đức sáng như gương
Hoa Nhân Ái nở trong vườn con tươi
Mẹ ru, Mẹ ru tiếng hát tuyệt vời
Mẹ ru, Mẹ ru, Mẹ ru tiếng hát Lòng Đời Ươm Hoa…

Tuệ Nga

The map of me can’t be all hills & mountains even though i’ve been country all my life. The twang in my voice has moved downhill to the flatland a time or two. My taste buds have exiled themselves from fried green tomatoes & rhubarb for goat milk & pine nuts. Still i return to old ground time & again, a homing blackbird destined to return. I am plain brown bag, oak & twig, mud pies & gut-wrenching gospel in the throats of old tobacco brown men. When my spine crooks even further toward my mother, i will continue to crave the bulbous tang of wild shallots, the familiar game of oxtails & kraut boiling in a cast iron pot. I toe-dive in all the rivers seeking the whole of me, scout virtual african terrain sifting through ancestral memories, but still i’m called back home through hymns sung by stout black women in large hats & flowered dresses. You have to risk the briar bush to reach the sweet dark fruit & ain’t no country woman all church & piney woods. There is pluck & cayenne pepper. There is juke joint gyrations in the youngun-bearing girth of this belly & these supple hips. All roads lead me back across the waters of blood & breast milk, from ocean to river, to the lake, to the creek, to branch & stream, back to the sweet rain, to the cold water in the glass i drink when i thirst to know where i belong.

Crystal Wilkinson

Our sorrow and our love move into a foreign language.
–C.P. Cavafy (tr. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

English is dead   even though you still say English
Words even though you still   put them in English order
Your English is dead   yet it tugs away from you
Like a strong dog fighting a leash   the harder

It fights the   greater is your fear
It won’t if it gets free   return En-
glish fights you like a language   you’re
Taking in school   knowing you’ll never see the country

In the spring the trees outside the window are
Alive with life in the fall alive
With death   all year the teacher’s voice slips past you
A distant ambulance in a strange city

English is dead   the one Great Dane you’ve ev-
er seen in real life howls in the street   still but its howl is
Noise to you now now   you don’t recognize
The feeling in its cry   its foreign vowels

Shane McCrae

Now I will learn how to tie an apron and unclasp
my bra from behind. I will become hard,
like a moss-covered rock. I’ll be stiff as a nightgown

dried on the line. When the pond freezes over, I’ll walk
to its center and lie face up until it is May
and I am floating. I’ll become an anchor
pitched skyward. I will steer chiseled ships,

spinning fortune’s splintered wheel. I will worry
over damp stones. I will clean ash
from the Madonna’s cheek using the wet

rag of my tongue. I’ll make myself shrine-like
and porcelain; I will stand still as a broken clock.
I will be sore from lovemaking. I will become so large,
my hair, loosened, will be mistaken for the swallow’s cave.

After June, there is a year of forgetting, after the forgetting,
antlers adorn the parlor walls. Then it snows, and I’ll be
coarse. I’ll be soft as my mother’s teeth. I’ll be sugar crystals

and feathery snow. I’ll be fine. I will melt.
I will make children from office paper. They’ll be cut
from my stomach wearing blank faces. Bald
and silent, they will come out of me: triplicates

holding hands. I will smooth their foreheads
with a cool iron. I will fold the tepid laundry, turn down
the sheets, then sleepwalk along the Mississippi
until it is ocean and I’m its muddy saint. I will baptize
myself in silt and December. I will become
a pungent, earthly bulb. I’ll pillar to salt. I’ll remember
the pain of childbirth, remember being born.

Ama Codjoe

A few times a week, Yiadom-Boakye
painstakingly cuts oil paintings she believes
aren’t up to snuff. Instead of re-priming
the canvas, she reduces it to 2 X 2 ½ meter
pieces. She begins again. This isn’t
an ars poetica. Once, I made love in daylight.

It was a Saturday or Sunday in November
or July. My lover and I stumbled toward
the bedroom, turning our mouths
and our stalk-like waists. I don’t remember
if I undressed myself. The edge of the bed felt
precipitous. I’ve forgotten almost everything

about that day except the competing limbs
of kissing, walking, fucking-how confused
my feet were until, at last, they did not
touch the floor. It was my fault, I wanted so
little. This is not a love poem. Not a catalogue
of attempts. Yiadom-Boakye doesn’t set her figures

in time or place. They are composites of photographs,
magazine cut-outs, and the occasional life drawing.
She doesn’t call them portraits. When she scissors
her failures into unmendable bits, she aims
to deter scavengers and thieves.
In the room where I write this, my hands
smell like Ginger Gold apples. For hours,
I’ve been looking out the window—staring
into the hallway we took to my bedroom. I know
the sky is a blue wall. I know the walls
were sky blue. Memory paints them yellow.
I’ll keep this revision. The rest I’ve thrown away.

Ama Codjoe

after Romare Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt (1969)

My back is turned from him again,
but this time I’m not hunched
over the quilt—his rough thumbs
gripping my waist—I’m standing
in the middle of a room constructed
with pencil, adhesive, and paper.
One foot in the basin, I will scrub
his cigarette hands and yellow eyes
off my skin. I will clean my sex
and start again. Another will come
and I’ll forget the coat hung gently
on the hook—different than the way
he took me. He shook like a startled
fish caught in a great blue heron’s beak.
Yes, a woman of my kind
has seen the sea. The first time, I gasped
at its glistening mouth.
Endlessly the waves replaced themselves.
I launder my nakedness like a uniform
with water from the pitcher.
Soon another will arrive who I will
wash away. There is a man who dares
to face me, he considers
every angle. He built my form
with precise lines and foraged scraps
of brown. From the harsh shape
my elbow makes, the builder knows
this is a portrait of work,
not pleasure. I love how softly
he touches me, though all I want
is to be left, to spend a morning in bed
alone with the images of dream.

Ama Codjoe

There’s a body marching toward mine.
I can feel its breasts and stomach, hot

against my back. Its breath in my hair.
I accumulate bodies—my own.

The tattoo braceleting my wrist.
My earlobe like a pin hole camera.

My vagina, untouched. My vagina,
stretched. So many bodies treading

toward the others. And the bruises I conceal
with makeup and denial. The scars I inflict

on myself, and the ones I contort
with a mirror to see. I didn’t always know

we’d be joined like this—that I couldn’t
leave any of myself behind.

In Trisha Brown’s Spanish Dance
a performer raises both arms like a bailora

and shifts her weight from hip to hip, knee
to knee, ankle to ankle, until she softly

collides with another dancer. The two travel
forward, pelvis to sacrum, stylized fingers

flared overhead, until they meet a third woman
and touch her back like stacked spoons.

Dressed in identical white pants and long
sleeves, the dancers repeat the steps

until, single file, five women shuffle
forward-they go no further.

The dance lasts the exact length of Bob Dylan’s
rendition of “Early Mornin’ Rain.”

How many versions of myself pile
into the others, arms lifted in surrender,

torsos twisting to the harmonica?
But the dancers—I’m moved by their strange

conga line. A train of women traversing
the stage, running gently into a wall.

Ama Codjoe

I feel naive when I think of it now,
how carelessly I stood before him,

like a ballet dancer in a dressing room
bright with the backs of other girls.

This was before the coldness he nursed
and kept warm between his thighs.

I waited too long for a thaw—he waited too.
Taking him into my mouth, I knew the ache

of winter. I heard the silences
grow as a field of stones between us.

When I look back at my body, young
in the bedroom dark, lit by a perpetual city,

I am gripping a rock in my right hand
and he is gripping a rock in his right hand.

We face each other, muscles poised for sex
or war. Who dropped the rock?

Who cast it? I’m unsure,
even now, who cried mercy first.

Ama Codjoe

I was newly naked: aware of myself
as a separate self, distinct from dirt and bone.

I had not hands enough,
and so, finally, uncrossed my arms.

In trying to examine one body part,
I’d lose sight of another. I couldn’t

imagine what I looked like during
the fractured angles of sex.

At the river’s edge, it was impossible
to see all of myself at once.

I began to understand nakedness
as a feeling.

It was a snake, loose and green;
it was the snake skin, coiled and discarded.

The shedding chained itself
like a balloon ribboned to a child’s wrist.

Morning’s birdsong reminded me
of the sloughing off of skin.

The rumored beauty of my husband’s first
wife never bothered me before.

I missed the sensation of being fixed
in amber. Then the hair in the comb,

fingernail clippings, the red mole on my
left breast grown suddenly bigger.

I perceived my likeness in everything:
the lines on my palm as the veins

of a leaf, my mind as a swarm of flies
humming over something sugary or dead,

my vulnerability as the buck
I’d kill, then wrap myself inside,

my hair as switchgrass, twine, and nest,
a roving cloud my every limb.

Ama Codjoe

What if, Betye, instead of a rifle or hand
grenade—I mean, what if after
the loaded gun that takes two hands
to fire, I lay down the splintered broom
and the steel so cold it wets
my cheek? What if I unclench the valleys
of my fist, and lay down
the wailing baby?
Gonna burn the moon in a cast-iron skillet.
Gonna climb the men who, when they see my face, turn into stony mountains.
Gonna get out of the kitchen.
Gonna try on my nakedness like a silk kimono.
Gonna find me a lover who eats nothing but pussy.
Let the whites of my eyes roll, roll.
Gonna clench my toes.
Gonna purr beneath my own hand.
Gonna take down my hair.
Try on a crown of crow feathers.
Gonna roam the wide aisles of the peach grove, light dripping off branches like syrup, leaves brushing the fuzz on my arms.
—You dig?—
Gonna let the juice trickle down my chin.
Gonna smear the sun like war paint across my chest.
Gonna shimmy into a pair of royal blue bell-bottoms.
Gonna trample the far-out thunderclouds, heavy in their lightness.
Watch them slink away.
Gonna grimace.
Gonna grin.
Gonna lay down my sword.
Pick up the delicate eggs of my fists.
Gonna jab the face that hovered over mine.
It’s easy to find the lips, surrounded as they are in minstrel black.
Gonna bloody the head of every god, ghost, or swan who has torn into me—pried me open with its beak.
Gonna catch my breath in a hunting trap.
Gonna lean against the ropes.
Gonna break the nose of mythology.
—Goodnight John-Boy—
Gonna ice my hands in April’s stream.
Gonna scowl and scream and shepherd my hollering into a green pasture.
Gonna mend my annihilations into a white picket fence.
Gonna whip a tornado with my scarlet handkerchief.
Spin myself dizzy as a purple-lipped drunkard.
Gonna lay down, by the riverside, sticky and braless in the golden sand.

Ain’t gonna study war no more.
Ain’t gonna study war no more.
Ain’t gonna study war no more.

Ama Codjoe