Poetry from Thailand

Original poetry written in and about rural Thailand.

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Location: Chong Khae, Nakhonsawan, Thailand

Sunday, February 2, 2014

To Be A Poet




 One of my earliest memories
is waking from a nap and looking
out a low second story window
in a house I otherwise do not
remember.  The window is open
and the sound of spring gently enters
the room.  My mother is talking to
a woman on a porch of another
house in back.  A huge white sheet
hangs flat from a clothes line beside
her. I can not see my mother, but
I feel her smile . . . but the white
sheet, glorious in the New Hampshire
noonday sun transfixes me to believe
my world is now safe for words.

This memory is almost seventy years
old as I sit in the shade of my patio
looking out  at rai upon rai of even,
green rice fields.  A gentle breeze
as if moved by the wings of a million
butterflies runs unimpeded over the
flat fields to me and to nowhere else.
Like memory itself the breeze reminds
me again that the world for some lucky
ones will be forever safe for words.

FG     2/2/2014

A rai is something less than half an acre (2.4 rai = an acre).

I was watching a science program which suggested that recognizing color occurs at the same time we begin to recognize words.  Speculation may not be much in the way of poetry, but . . .  Burn It Where It Lays and Fire are two other poems where I diddle with this theory.

The butterflies are from the chaos theory which I think I use in the poem about Mrs. Zeller.  This chaos theory can’t work every time, so there should be a theory for a lesser god, no?

Got the miseries, again.  AKA gout attack.