Things That I Know

Here is the first poem I wrote about my childhood in Indonesia. I wrote it in about 2004. Enjoy...


Things That I Know

The smell of a monsoon rain,
the pressing silence after.
The sound of wind in a bamboo thicket,
the thick cold of mud that settles
between toes in a rice paddy
in the long season of rain.

How to climb a coconut tree
with my bare hands and feet,
what noise a rhinoceros beetle makes,
rattling angry in the matted grass.
Sweat that radiates from the body
at 105 degrees, mid-October sun
in my window, glaring.

A place where the earth melts away
in the stillness of dawn, where shadows
stretch long in a sandy crater as the red sun
creeps over the volcano’s edge,
pouring into the barren mountain
like lava.

The voice of the Indian Ocean
calling out in the dark to all the distant shores
it may never touch, the heavy water
turning itself at the edges,
pulling over glistening beaches,
reaching again toward the deep.