Portside

Requiem for Cambodia

By Charlotte Muse
 
Many years after the KR atrocities, he trauma in the hearts of many Cambodians is still unresolved. --Matthias Witzel

   
When the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh,
some people waved and hung out white flags,
but they were wrong.     
Look as long as you like--they’re gone.
The restaurants of fish and vegetables, 
(river water flickering in sun),
the tea shops, the stands selling sweet rice,
boulevards lined with rose and tamarind,
schoolboys in khaki, girls in blue--
all gone.  The coconut dance is done.
You won’t find a soul anymore who celebrates
King’s Day at the Una Lam Temple. Remember? 
People would wear arrow-shaped white flowers in their hair.

Everyone had to walk away.
Everywhere, blood.  Everywhere, bodies, dead, dead,
and families torn.  People made to work the fields;
to die there, hungry. 

We ask why, but who can tell
how many devils it takes to make Hell?

They killed so many. They’d kill you.
If you spoke out of turn, they’d kill you.
If you broke a sickle, they’d kill you.
Whoever you were -- a child
or feeble with age, they’d kill you.
They’d kill you.    

In the few pictures that reached the West,
the American  ambassador grabs the flag
and runs to the helicopter. 
Lines of people bend in the fields.
Young brown soldiers at the edge of the jungle
smile, holding up
heads.
  
We killed them with wooden hoes,
wasting no bullets.
Some we hung over rice hull fires,
or tied where red ants could feast on their wounds.

So much death has its own beauty. 
Pain sets off
red and yellow lights--
I used to be able to see them.
When their screams made me tighten my ears --
you know that rumble of blood--
oh, ho!   It’s a kind of ecstasy.  We took them up
to be split.  We wanted to hear
the noise of their opening.  

At long last, when Pol Pot stumbled sick and old
out of the jungle, the living world watched.
What was there to feel for the old murderer?
Let him die or be killed, who cares?
And Kissinger, the one with the Peace Prize who ordered
bombs-- who cares?

Now skulls are singing a dry song,
having been uncovered and put into piles.
Now whatever winds there are
blow through the eyes and play them.

It’s the settling tune of wooden floors,
of sand grains hissing down the dune,
a chuckle! when an animal jumps on the pile.
The teeth, poor things, still try to make “eeeee”.

Charlotte Muse lives, writes, and teaches poetry in Menlo Park, California. Her website address is:  www.charlottemuse.net