Poetry about traveling

For today’s post, grab a cup-a, and sink into your favorite sun-filled sitting spot to enjoy our Travel Literature Series entitled “Bloviations” featuring the published writer and poet Alex Rainey Ward. This piece of prose-poetry about traveling was inspired by living and traveling in Vietnam—a great place for your body and soul to chase the sun.

Vietnamese Tales: Ahahayra

Alex Rainey Ward

For Ace

Bang Phuc. City of Wounds. City of Boom-Boom. City of Mother Han widely and peacefully flowing. She’s a short river, but she carries herself like a Nile. She’s a healing river, a river Jordan. Once upon a time there’d been two enemies, Beachside and Mountainside, but Mother Han’s breadth forced these two adversaries apart. They’d drawn cudgels and were ready to beat each other, they were sweating and breathing hard, the murderous sun was egging them on. Then Mother Han up and said, “Wait a minute, boys-just sit down and think about it for a moment.” And she sprouted a nice little shade tree on either bank with a soft place to sit, appointing one to each adversary. As Beachside and Mountainside thought about it, looking at each other across the wide shining river, they forgot their enmity and became brothers. On the site where they’d made peace they built a village together.

It was a fishing village. What else would it have been, the sea was right there, like the soil in the Golden Age that yielded food without being tilled. The sea just sort of automatically filled their nets to bursting with fish-all they had to do was lower the damn things into the water. And rather than making Beachside and Mountainside greedy, the sea’s abundance made them thankful and reverent. Their god lived in the sea, and it was She, Ahahayra, who emerged from it shivering one morning and showed them how to make fire. This was long ago, when it was just the two reconciled men and their wives and children. And of course, she taught them how to sing, because that’s all the sea does. She taught them how to make instruments. And the people grew and flourished, and their language was music. Then one day Ahahayra decided to give them a written language, and every morning the beach would be littered, like starfish, with ideograms written in the sand.

It was Ahahayra who told me this story. She told me of how the deep soil goes down, down, plumbing the depths of the past, told me about the Thin White Root. The soil fills most of the picture in Vietnam, leaving very little room for the sky. There, it’s a life of earth, work, and ancestors. And every year, despite Bang Phuc’s manic hotel-building and callow tourism, the rainy season comes and returns things to the Beforetime, when there were no people, only water, Ahahayra and Mother Han.

The fishing village was never lost: it was right outside my window, men walking by, riding by on moto-bikes with oars slung over their shoulders. An oar was still worth more than money, at least in that part of the city, where creaky old ships were drydocked in vacant lots. I wanted my own oar. I wondered how much they cost. I’d have slung it over my shoulder and set off whistling, except I couldn’t leave the confines of Vietnam. That is, if I’d left, I wouldn’t have been able to come back, and the thought of returning to America gave me the shivers, everything was too cubist there somehow, too boxy, mundane. I needed rain-beaten roofs, roofs held on with bricks, I needed to hear the silent feet of rats all around me, I needed to breathe pollution and shoot snot out one side of my nose, needed leaf-hat ladies, needed the absurd oversized curved-like-a-scythe straw besoms that the garbage ladies used to sweep the curbs all day long, needed brown eyes, dark hair, and a language like pots and pans banging together. But you now: just walk with an oar slung over your shoulder and set off whistling and pretty soon you’ll find yourself in a coracle heading out through the uncharted islands of Ahahayra that belong not to China, not to Vietnam, but only to the sea.

About the Author: Alex Rainey Ward writes obsessively in notebooks. Reads cheap paperbacks and highlights random passages. Has published poems in The Tiny, Bateau Press, Forklift, Ohio, Eclectica Magazine, Anemone Sidecar, Kill Poet, Snow Monkey and others. Also, be sure to check out his musical project Charmings.

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Old Fishing Village (Da Nang, Viet Nam)
Photographed by Alissa 2018;
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Here is a view of Vietnam. The peninsula Son Tra shining green in background. With the white “Lady Buddha” statue gleaming and protecting the city-village from the Monsoons. A man is dragging his conical grass boat out to sea. Out to Ahahayra.