Vuong Pham
Vuong Pham is a schoolteacher of English and SOSE. He enjoys writing poetry, playing soccer, and practicing piano. His poetry has been published in Notes from the Gean, The Heron’s Nest, Positive Words, SpeedPoets, Free Xpression, Brisbane Arts Guide, PaperWasp, Sampad, Shamrock Haiku, Third Australian Haiku Anthology, and QUTE Magazine. He lives in Brisbane, Australia. He blogs at: http://versesoftheinnerself.
Mother
I know now, as I did in my childhood wonder
that my mother dreamed of a different life,
one unbound by war and exodus.
On the living room carpet we sit
and I pluck her graying hairs, ask:
‘Mother, what was your passion in life?’
She smiles—that eternal smile,
a question suspended in mid-air,
her neck tilted like a sunflower
too heavy to meet the sky.
Gardening is the reply I expect.
My mind’s eye turns to childhood, to shadows
stirring beneath star fruit trees,
rows of cherry tomatoes growing over fences,
a call to supper while sleeping
amongst lotus-ridden ponds.
‘Nothing,’ she replies, ‘nothing really’.
I slump in disappointment,
until, having completed the task of
brushing gray hair from her shoulder, she adds:
‘Teaching was my passion. High school.’
I smile in agreement. And as I do,
rushing jigsaw-puzzle pieces of memory
lock together, fragments of my past are made whole.
‘A literacy teacher’, I exclaim,
she smiles, with similar excitement to that moment
I had come home from school holding a certificate
of merit, commending my improved literacy skills.
The daylight lengthens
as our quiet conversations linger, perfect
in all their subtle obscurity. And, I know now,
as I did in my childhood wonder about mother’s life
when she was in her twenties—before any bloodshed,
in Saigon. I imagine her driving that yellow scooter,
heading towards school to teach; students lining up
orderly for class, the angled lean of 8th graders, eyes
gazing to her voice, telling stories of a time when
boys were dragon incarnates, girls could turn into fairies;
among landscapes dotted by women tending to paddies,
children splashing beside the water buffalo; speeding past
the warm, sticky air bathing street markets,
comforting scent of mungbean rice, odour of dry fish,
raw flesh hung on butcher’s hooks,
that familiar crescendo of rickshaws, scooters
and bicycles. All of which, was the city
she will no longer call home. And still,
in the quieting halls of our living room, she weaves
those patches of nostalgia together to help face
the unending fact of our freedom and hope.
More gray hairs fall to the floor, the stories continue,
and as they do, I know now, as I did in my childhood wonder
how the teaching legacy passed down to me—
for the weight of providing for her children outshone
university degree teaching aspirations. That in mind, I tell her:
‘Mother, this week I taught my students Wordsworth,
saw thousands of daffodils and thought of you’.
She smiles, and I’m taken back to a halcyon-time
in childhood that reminded me of how she stitched floral
pyjamas, tablecloths, bedsheets together,
using a sewing machine for less than $5 an hour, to afford rice,
pork, Asian vegetables, and help pay for my tuition
so I could learn to spell ‘persistent’ correctly—
praying that I might speak an unbroken English tongue,
and never be confined to the labors of factories.
I know now, as I did in my childhood wonder
what it must’ve been to mother, there
among the refugee boat thrumming harsh, the faces
of Saigon watching sadly—eyeballs ribboned with flames
incandescent, a mess of skeleton animate in the lightning storm:
the day the homeland was a mist, the boat a stain, the dark
depths of sea spat on the horizon like some infernal womb,
boats wet as one long vowel, as the city crumbled
and my mother among them fled
with nothing but me, growing inside.
