Train Of Thought

Disembodied Bamboo

Bamboo has a voice
The voice of hollow hunger
As though a whole country cries inside its flute
giving out a disembodied signal.

Voices cannot be silenced in graves.
They rise like winds from rivers
and takeover the groves of the mind,
hunting consciousness.

Bamboo is an anagram for bomb
that old engine of death
welded to ghosts in pairs
speaking loudly at night.

In my old imagination
I catch myself crouching in bamboo groves.
Hiding from god knows what
My retina concealed by its leaves, like a tiger concealed by grass.

Once I took a bamboo train
from a bamboo platform to a bamboo patch
grazed clean by carabao...but it wasn't enough.
Sometimes even too much is not enough.

Many decades ago, workers found a heart
when renovating a church and placed it in a small bamboo box,
the non human counterpart of Life, Dreams and Reality.
Ever since then, bamboo has become my mother bird.

Purify me with a switch of bamboo grass
beside an oil lamp
Afterwards, the dugout canoes with cabins of split bamboo
will provide me with all the rest I need.
*********