Viyaya

Vijaya

I remember the day the Americans arrived at our village,
Remaining camped outside for six months:
Tanks bivouacked in the shade,
The foreign laughter, music from the radios,
And, eventually, how one of them raped my neighbor’s daughter,
A bony girl of twelve, and later,
Smashed her skull with one quick snap of his rifle butt.

My neighbor saw nothing else that year,
Not how the moon pared itself to almost nothing every month,
Nor the leanness of his own goats, wandering aimlessly
Along the dirt road, their fur caked with shit.
All he heard for a long time afterward
Was the hollowness of a sound
So sudden it obliterated everything else.
The silence afterward pervaded the village for weeks,
And, along with the heat, muted all sound that year, even
When the Americans occasionally fired shots
In the direction of our huts, and their faint
Tittering afterward.
They were boys—quick to laugh, and loudly.
Passing by them on the road, I remember how solemn some looked,
Even truly frightened, as if afraid of the jungle itself.

When I was their age, the village
Had already given me my field
And had built me a house when I married.
And though the moon hung laden and yellow
Over the fields that first autumn,
We knew the monsoons were to come, as they did every year.
Some years we could predict the beginning of the winds.

We used reeds to keep count,
Just as we did later although for another purpose.
And just as then, it became very important to remain calm
And to work with precision, as if assembling
The most intricate of devices, which is what we did,
And at night in the jungle, while others of us, keeping watch,
Peered out at the soldiers on the road
Under a moon that made their pale skin shine.

By that time, my neighbor’s mind had become fragile
And transient as smoke,
As the wings of a warbler my son found
One day outside the village just before
The shelling began in the hills near Vijaya,
Bones he held very carefully in his cupped hands,
As if, at eight, he already knew their importance:
How they made grace possible, and how,
Like the bones of the human face, they break too easily
Under the right pressure:  
Monsoon, blunt rage.
What winds brought these fires
Across the seas to us?