In Context: Mekong Delta - Erin Rodoni

[Larry Robinson]

In Context: Mekong Delta


Somewhere, in a place entirely unlike
this one, the crown of the Mekong fissures
Earth’s tallest granite, thrust skyward

by the collision of continents that might
as well be gods in a myth we made,
so we could nod, say ah this is how

this came to be. The Mekong does not
know it is destined to lose itself
in the South China Sea, does not know

it is a river. For now it is only a melting
out of silence, a shifting from static
into motion. In the Himalayas

streams blossom with the trees,
glitter their own little Shangri-las
from every cliff and crag and crevice,

until the season avalanches into a tumult
of rapids, ripping new canyons through hills
that only look like they are standing still.

Land of a million elephants, land of smiles,
kingdoms, pagodas, wars working their way
through the salt mines of unwon minds.

When foothills spill into killing fields,
the Mekong yawns wide enough to live
on, to buy and sell on. To be sold on.

Whatever language it has gathered in its rushing
over stones, under bridges, in its lugging
of the dropped, the drowned, the used,

it will lose. Every second it is different
water whispering never again never
again. If we could ride it like a many-headed

serpent as it splays into the sea, for a while
it would remain its own current, but eventually
whatever body it’s become in its loose holding,

whatever sound it has become in its one yearning
toward exactly this disappearing, is replaced
by whatever the sea says when it forgets

the chant it repeats on every beach,
the one we mistranslate ash to ash,
dust to dust.


	- Erin Rodoni