A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Mother of Waters, River of Nine Dragons

Teresa Mei Chuc, Vietnam-USA

 

“Dam construction on the Mekong River poses a serious threat to the region’s economies and ecosystems. The only way to mitigate that threat is to end defiant unilateralism and embrace institutionalized collaboration focused on protecting each country’s rights and enforcing its obligations — to its people, its neighbors, and the planet.” 

— Brahma Chellaney (August 2, 2019)

 

Sông Mê Kông, flowing from the Tibetan Plateau

through China, Myanmar,

Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam

and into the country of my heart

 

where the wild rice grows

and the villagers live and have lived

for thousands of years,

 

where the Irrawaddy dolphins,

the giant catfish and softshell turtles swim,

 

where the sarus cranes feed

on insects, seeds, fish in the river reeds,

and open their majestic wings to take flight,

 

where the lilies and lotus bloom,

where our ancestors are alive, 

 

where the water buffaloes bathe

their thousand-pound bodies

submerged in the river of my soul,

their heads on the water’s surface,

curving horns pointing towards the sky,

 

where Sông Cửu Long, 

River of Nine Dragons flow

through thick palm and green mangrove forests,

where the douc langur and white-cheeked gibbon exist,

 

and salt and fresh water mix,

 

I, your daughter, am forever connected to you 

though thousands of miles away.


  

Poet Laureate of Altadena (2018 to 2020), Teresa Mei Chuc is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012), Keeper of the Winds (FootHills Publishing, 2014) and Invisible Light (Many Voices Press, 2018). She was born in Saigon, Vietnam and immigrated to the U.S. under political asylum with her mother and brother shortly after the Vietnam War while her father remained in a Vietcong "reeducation" camp for nine years. Her poetry appears in journals such as Consequence Magazine, EarthSpeak Magazine, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Kyoto Journal, Rattle, Whitefish Review, Verse Daily and in anthologies such as New Poets of the American West (Many Voices Press, 2010), With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century (West End Press, 2014, and Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (W.W. Norton, 2017). Teresa is a graduate of the Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont and teaches literature and writing at a public high school in Los Angeles. 

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