Indochina's gone
“Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.” (Michael Herr, ‘Dispatches’)
Just another city now, Saigon.
The glamour and horror left,
the epicentre of the storm’s moved on,
viewed from the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo
or the Europa in Belfast.
Here the duller struggle starts
trading Tiger Balm on dusty streets
or - if you’re lucky - making money fast.
Those visions which seared our minds are fading:
The child running
from her burning skin.
Forests spreading red instead of green.
The soldiers with clinker gaze.
Now no buzz of war obliterates my memories.
My real war was always in the home.
A landscape blitzed by megatons of scorn,
where the child I was looked longing through others’
windows
for a kinder fireside.
Now Indochina’s gone.
Lives lost in wars or ruin
in these streets or at home
can’t be re-lived.
Yet slowly we learn to look for what survives.
Stall sellers cherishing their tawdry goods.
The wild blues-playing Confucian on his Bau.
The party hacks’ kids thronging the yuppy bars.
The Oscar-winning cripple running from the rain.
All living as best they can.
Just an ordinary place now, Vietnam
like the streets I longed to leave when I was young.
But, thirty years on, freedom of a kind has come
late maybe, battered and compromised
endurance not triumph in peoples’ eyes.
Still joy flashes from smiles full of bad teeth
a swagger in the style
that survives the pot-holed streets.
There’s a rainbow in the storm gold sky above Saigon.
Page(s) 57-58
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