#hilary tham

[poetrypository]

from Reflected Light, Hilary Tham

When I was twenty, I said, All men are false, their minds like sparrows, feet hot on electric wires against sky. They take off and go when the wind blows long hair, young life.

At thirteen, I despised the unequal, struggling marriages in my hometown, envied the serenity of the nuns at school. I wanted to be a nun.

At sixteen, I had learned Te, Virtue, too well to abandon my parents as they aged. Sitting on a curve of rain tree root, I broke open seed pods, dry with ripeness, picked out the red seeds. Threw them one by one into the drain. They stayed where they landed. No water flowed in the drain.

I remember the dry feel of dust between my toes, and the light leaving the sky, the road; the road that ran forever to where land touched sky. I remember the crows overheard squawking, bidding others settles down, quit rocking the branch.

Love is messy, life is messy, I told myself. The product of love is life. The product of life is love. Love which does not last. Babies are delivered in a puddle of blood and water. When we die, we leave our bodies leaking for worms. I thought of hospitals and delivery rooms and postal systems and said: We are God’s mailing system; each birth is a solicitation: “Please contribute…”

[poetrypository]

Becoming A Woman, Hilary Tham

When I was twelve, my mother initiated me into the mysteries of becoming a woman with a pound of rice-paper, the unadvertised kind made from stalks and leaves, the stubble after the harvest. She taught me the art of crumpling, stretching, folding the sheafs into a likeness of Modess-factory-rejects.   "You will bleed at a special time of the moon." she told me.  "Use these to reserve modesty and the secret of your femaleness." Her mother's way she passed to me with the few words she had received at her initiation. Each full moon I cursed the tides within my body.  I abandoned tradition's rice-paper. I have forgiven the moon since our children came, spores of sunrise in their newborn hands.

[poetrypository]

5 a.m. in Shah Alam, Malaysia, Hilary Tham

When the muezzin’s call to prayer spirals through mike and wire, Sound blooms from the minarets, stanzas of Quranic verse rise like smoke from a distant bonfire, up into the pre-dawn darkness of the universe. 

Sound blooms from the minarets, stanzas of Quranic verse. A rooster reminded of duty must raise its wings and call up into the pre-dawn darkness of the universe. A thread of sound that invades the dreams of all. 

A rooster reminded of duty must raise its wings and call. The sultan in his palace dreams of gunning his new Jaguar, A thread of sound that invades the dreams of all. Somewhere a child looks skyward for a falling star. 

The sultan in his palace dreams of gunning his new Jaguar. Somewhere an old one dies, somewhere, a baby’s cries. Somewhere a child looks skyward for a falling star. Others hug a pillow and pull darkness back over weary eyes. 

Somewhere an old one dies, somewhere, a baby’s cries rise like smoke from a distant bonfire. Others hug a pillow and pull darkness back over weary eyes When the muezzin’s call to prayer spirals through mike and wire.