The American Poetry Review

from 36 WAYS OF WRITING A VIETNAMESE POEM

[4. Aegic / All-encompassing]

You can’t go far wrong with violence.
You’ll go far, my boy.
You’ll cross oceans, my boy.

Start with the Fall, go back or forth,
Through bombs or boats,
Across all the killing fields of thought.

You can’t make it up
Because it’s all yours—by blood.
By right. By wrong done to your blood.

Hold to trauma.
Even if it never happened to you
You may claim it.

Your blood contains it.
What happened to them—
Your parents, theirs, all their kin—

Who don’t talk about it
Because of what happened to them—
Is yours to take and tell.

Their harm / your hurt.You may write it. For it is written.In the very walls of your cells.

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