A Shower of Blessings

With a shower of blessings upon you,

With roses strewn across your path,

With every coincidence becoming meaningful,

Fulfilling all the dreams you have harboured,

May you dance through this journey called Life

And blossom like a wildflower

In the hands of God

Phoenix

“Once upon a time in the cyberworld. That’s what I’m going to name my blog,” Nguyen Thi Phuong said to her friend, Huynh Minh Kim. They were at the writer’s club in the Ba Dinh district of Hanoi. There had been an informal meeting of the writers nearby, and now they were all dispersing.

 

Kim, a middle-aged blogger with sharp eyes, gave an exaggerated sigh of relief. “At last! I guess all my bugging you about it was worth it. Now give up those poems, for goodness’ sake.”

 

Phuong laughed. Kim had been urging her for the last few months to write things that actually had something to do with the people around her. Which meant that he wanted her to speak up bravely for the truth.

 

But in a country like Vietnam, online censorship was intense and ruthless. One word against the government and you’d be in for up to five or ten years. The writers of Hanoi had seen whole generations of writers effectively silenced. There were bloggers and activists that had been in jail for even twenty years. You had to be die-hard brave to speak the truth. And being brave wasn’t necessarily easy.

 

But Kim was different. He didn’t care a fig for what they would do to him. He was a terrific blogger, posting new write-ups every day. Pretty much everyone knew that the authorities had an eye on him, because his writings wandered dangerously over the boundaries of what was allowed and what wasn’t. The last few months Kim had spoken against the unexplained attack against an activist in the Ba Dinh district. Last week he had gone all out and condemned the “inhumanity of the present regime against the artists of the day”.

 

“Get busy living or get busy dying,” was what Kim would say with a grin.

 

At last Phuong had decided to speak up as well. This evening she would start her blog. “Well, see you. And keep safe,” she said to Kim, and boarded her bus back home.

 

That was the last time she ever saw Kim.

 

At five o’ clock, one of their mutual friends, Hoang called her up agitatedly. “Phuong, they sent a group of thugs to attack Kim!”

 

Phuong’s gasped. “And?”

 

“They took him into a van and drove off. He’s probably in prison now.”

 

Phuong felt dizzy. She let this settle in her mind.

 

“Well, I don’t think we’ll see him again, will we?” Phuong asked.

 

“No, we won’t…” Hoang replied quietly.

 

Phuong hung up. Well now the fight was in her hands.

 

She went up to her laptop immediately, and started her new blog.

 

She was going to post at once.

 

It took her about two hours, but at last she had ready a stabbing essay of two thousand words condemning the attack against Kim. She titled it “This is Now: When Our Officials Become Thugs”, and sent it to all 270 of her contacts. She also shared it to her writer’s club WhatsApp group. There were two hundred writers in that. “Writers who would never stand up for the truth,” she whispered to herself angrily.

 

Two minutes later tens and then hundreds of messages swamped her WhatsApp. Hoang sent an angry voice message: “What on earth do you think you’re doing, you nitwit? They’ll have seen it by now! They’ll come for you.”

 

Phuong replied with a calm voice message. “I’m past caring. I’m all for the truth now.”

 

“They’ll beat you up just like they did with Kim, you idiot,” Hoang replied urgently. “Go hide somewhere….”

 

“Well, what doesn’t kill me is gonna make me stronger,” she replied with a quiet voice message.

 

She put her phone aside and flexed her paining hands. She began to type her next essay.

 

Ten minutes to ten, her doorbell rang. Phuong got up, trembling. She sent Hoang a voice message: “They’ve come for me, Hoang.”

 

Let the fight pass on into another writer’s hands, she thought to herself.

 

She stood before the locked door. The doorbell rang again. She drew her breath, and for some reason, she thought of her name.

 

Phuong.

 

It meant ‘phoenix’.

 

“Well, time for me to go down burning. Let the next phoenix rise from the ashes,” she whispered, and unlocked the door.

 

 

 

Hope Sonnet

I woke up one day in a world

Where people die by the thousands,

And I cried like a little child.

I want the numbers to stop rising and

Healing to spread, contagious - 

And so I hope.

This hope is a sonnet

I hold tightly in my fist

I do not let go, because I know it will heal.

I tell myself that life doesn't end here

And that God is with us in this suffering

I hope all this will soon end

I get up and go on with life.

I feel stronger now - I am stronger now

One Word is Enough

It was the celebration of progress

And the song of modernity blared out

Life's rules were the same as jazz, and

Everything depended on pretty much nothing

But now all the billions of us,

Watch as the song of modernity

Crumbles to silence.

We see rising numbers, vanishing lives

Sickness dances in the breeze

Like an angry ballerina

Wrecking havoc on the past, present, 

And future

And the whole world, all the billions of us

Are searching, praying, hoping, crying, 

For one word and one word only:

Healing

A Song For You

There is a sweet song

          Dancing through the skies,

On the wings of the wind

          To your home, to your heart,

To tell you:

          Life is bright

Hope is daily

          When your hands

Hold onto God