for William & Abigail
You are small eastern verse
that illuminates like lightning.
Orphaned couplet. Ancestors
of the first Vietnamese poem:
There: wild geese, swimming side by side,
Staring up at the sky.
White feathers against a deep blue,
Red feet burning in green waves.
Lifetimes later,
you cross oceans.
Too tiny for diapers,
too fragile for hands,
You land, unashamed,
on our war-weary shores.
Your arrival
an epiphany:
The smallest of packages
bearing so much weight.
Just as serendipity
is the unused word for chance,
You are the abandoned
vocabulary that is all too relevant.
Tongues of flame
alive above our heads,
You give us the power
to speak a necessary language.
*first recorded Vietnamese poem (circa 987), by Do Phap Thuan and Li Chueh
