Con cò mà đi ăn đêm**
Đậu phải cành mềm, lộn cổ xuống ao ***
Night darkens on an egret’s porcelain wings.
A lullaby begins and ends with silence.
Mother’s love begins and ends with silence.
A branch snaps. The egret tumbles into death.
A bomb blasted. My mother tumbled into
orphanhood. What’s unsung: the baby egret’s
hunger—orphaned song of survival.
The egretlet begs to be loved. Its mother
begs to be killed in pure water. Dirty
water will break my child’s heart. Truth is,
a heart is an unbreakable thing, only
lonely. Baby egret becomes a mother
of its loneliness. Every nightly feed,
the moon shatters on its porcelain wings.
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*The poem borrows the form of a duplex, a poetic invention by Jericho Brown.
**The poem crawls from the throat of ca dao, a traditional form of Vietnamese folk poetry.
***This particular ca dao, known for its first line The egret forages at night, is often sung as a lullaby.
