Mai-Lan Pham | Rattle: Poetry

Mai-Lan Pham

RONDO FOR THE NIGHT

Let go.

Change will come,

and then will come again.

Let go.

Maybe weep a little

for what has been lost,

but then

there is the lightness

of having nothing at all.

Let go.

Your hands were full once

and, holding on to everything,

what else did you do?

Let go.

Feel the cool air on your palms.

Your feet will move,

one, and then the other,

as they have always done.

Let go.

You will not fall

with nothing to stay you.

The body knows what to do.

The biology and chemistry

and physics of you

have existed

long before you presumed

to name them.

Let go.

You are still lungs,

heart, and brain,

still tears

and blood, and song.

You are all that has gone

wrong, and all

that has not.

Let go.

Who decides

what is enough?

Who can tell

what would have led

anywhere else but here?

Let go.

Remember the child you were,

before the naming and sorting,

before love, before hate,

before you learned to count time,

and in so doing, began to fear

its eventual loss.

Let go.

At nightfall

you walked in dreams

and saw through darkness.

The body knows how to find its way.

Let the body find its way.

—from Poets Respond
December 31, 2017

[download audio]

__________

Mai-Lan Pham: “And the year comes to an end. Not just any year, but the year 2017. As the ‘Year in Review’ retrospectives come in, each one more grim than the last, I wanted to step back from our collective paroxysm of fear. We have done it before. We have always carried on.”

Mai-Lan Pham

PAUSE

Soon enough you grow tired of it—

the clamoring

gale force wind of loss,

the things that make you angry,

and the anger itself.

To sit in stillness for a morning, then.

Rain tapping on the window,

tea gone cold, leaving

a ring on the sill,

in your hand,

that tattered volume

on 19th century American furnishing

extracted on a whim from

the dollar cart,

just to read about Mary Todd Lincoln

in her favorite chair,

as she looked out the window,

remembering how he was holding her hand

when the bullet came.

—Poets Respond
March 5, 2017

[download audio]

__________

Mai-Lan Pham: “During the President’s address to Congress on Tuesday, we watched as the camera focused for two interminable minutes on the private grief of Carryn Owens, whose husband, Navy SEAL Senior Chief Ryan Owens, was killed in the late-January raid in Yemen. Afterwards I thought about her and other widows who have had to bear their grief in public, and how that grief is bone-deep and quiet and lonely, and cannot be fathomed by any length of sustained applause on national TV.”