Here we follow up on last issue’s poetry page ‘On the Written Word’ with a collection of poetry ‘On the Spoken Word’. We start with Roger Elkin’s evocative Ironies More than Orange, which effectively expresses the poetry to be felt in the patterns and rhythms of an EFL student’s speech. Meanwhile, in shadow: dwelling: Jessica Goodfellow examines the experience of expatriate limbo through her narrator’s incisive focus on the nuances of specific words.

And while on the topic of specific words, how could we not finish with a Dirty Word from Bruce McRae? Not a teacher in sight in this piece, but what teacher could not be entertained by the hyperbolic energy of its vivid, cartoon violence? Hence, a special dispensation for Uncle Elmer’s x-rated mouth!

 

Ironies More than Orange

Dong Minh Man Tells us about the Cu Chi tunnel system

He’s usually straight-faced, almost bland, as he negotiates
the pitfalls of English grammar, unaware of how the consonants
lay their traps for him, but, today, his face brightens into lantern:
eyes lively, eyebrows dancing, his mouth, lips, tongue
rehearsing the mantra he’s rehearsed from childhood:

The American they fire the babies
fire the children                the woman
fire cows       other animal
They fire the Buddha even

They burn the house      the crop            burn trees
Take their leaves              their fruits         burn them
The American they burn them

They bomb           poison water     poison the river
Spray chemical you know agent orange
flame napalm    the ground all burn
Our family wasted            gone     still now born unformed
in the second    third generation

But the trees leafs back again
The mangrove                    the rubber         the bamboo
they grow            their leaf they thick and strong
They fruit four season                   many fruit

Our people farmer by day            soldier in night
They dig pit          make swing-trap
American they step         and swish it spin
They fall in           bamboo spike kill him     he die

Some soldier of our        they live ten eleven year
under the ground            dig deep three level
Dig tunnel            tunnel very dark                No no light

Have men and woman keep separate
Have like hospital you know under the ground
Have escape to keep safe

But all no stay alive                               they die

Our soldier secret             know only three thing

walk without trace            turn many leafs to hide
cook without smoke         give morning mist be brother to the smoke
talk without speak             teach fingers to walk words

Falling silent, his eyes deepen to grievances.

Forty years on, he understands the ironies that lie
in clichés such as actions speak louder than words
and the future’s bright, the future’s orange.

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shadow: dwelling:*

Dwelling in a foreign land, time is the only familiar
tableau, last locus. Even your shadow falls aslant here,
aping you strangely, or are you really hunched and scurrying
along the sidewalk? When did you grow so much
smaller? It is easy to become nostalgic. One easy thing.
Clearly time is not a landscape to make a home in.
Your beloved, in whose beloved city you now dwell,
agrees one of you has an advantage. But who? Remind
your beloved dwell, from Old English, meant to lead
astray, to wander. As ravel has twisted into unravel
and also its opposite. Meanwhile, your fingers twirl
a key ring. Abide, suggests your beloved, say you abide here,
remembering too late that abide echoes to endure,
to tolerate, to bear. Are all the words for holding still
so fraught? You both settle on reside, free
of overtones, swinging your legs over the balcony
that overlooks the park where you go sometimes
alone to feed the little yellow birds that remind you
of your childhood home. Neither you nor your beloved
suggests you claim to live here. Secretly you think
you dwell here, you are raveling, you are unraveling—
becoming opposite, and opposite’s opposite. Only
your shadow lives here, still having everything
it has always had. Because your body is its roof.
Because you are its home. Its homeless home.