Monica For many poets, writing is a kind of offering. “My family is culturally Theravada Buddhist,” she said Adroit Journal. “As adults, we offer fruit and water on the table. . . . I like to think that every ordinary thing we do is ritual. My poems, the writing itself. Laughter. Nourishment. Any kindness. Anything that opens a portal.”
The daughter of Cambodian refugees who fled Phnom Penh and settled in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Sok turned to poetry to explore her own family history and interrogate the U.S. government’s role in the genocide of Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge regime. His debut collection, A nail hangs in the eveninghe mythologizes his own family’s narrative in a haunting portrait of generational trauma, collective memory, and ongoing healing work. The poems follow Sok’s journeys to Siem Reap’s historical sites and war museums, and in one poem even conveys the goal – as Sok says: reincarnated-Henry Kissinger’s order for a bombing raid. “I hope my tongue is the kind of weapon that disarms other weapons,” says Sok. “Not to do more damage, but to take weapons, knock down walls.”
—Sarah Fleming
In the Room of a Thousand Buddhas
The water fell in my heart. to my right
Row of Buddhas in meditation
protected by the Naga snake, but this snake was real,
unlike the American and the heads in his closet.
The Naga protected the Buddha from the rain,
spread out the hood of the week to keep it dry.
And did I mention it rained all day?
I bought a poncho to go horse riding in Siem Reap.
Rain in the dry season. Buddha calls the earth
as a witness. Something waterproof
they’re doing it at Standing Rock now. Protection of water
because water is life. But a night of rubber bullets
and tear gas and water hoses, this is not life.
Even today, while in my hotel, I ate breakfast pasta
Neo-Nazis saluted in Harrisburg on their way home.
They didn’t shout to the ground with their palms up
but face down. For the Buddhas,
i thought They look like me.
Some have wider shoulders, some are pre-Angkor
and from Angkor times, some from this century,
four people sit back to back in a circle,
each in a different mudra. Sandstone. Wood industry. Stone.
Depending on what was available
or how kings chose to perpetuate the one they worshipped.
Sitting on the scrolls of the Naga. Closed eyes.
Or look down. Some of them look scared. Calm down.
Some have their hands missing or cracked on their sides.
Some look starved. Their clothes were torn.
One, made of wood, was damaged while standing.
Except for a small lip curve and a closed left eye.
There are others, smaller, smaller than humans.
♦
From A nail hangs in the eveningcopyright 2020, Monica Sok, used by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
