Paddy Field Memorials, Vietnam

The power of memories, individual and national, true and false. By Stephen Barnaby

Seen again and again

From a coach connecting

Ho Chi Minh City and Can Tho

Anomalous in paddy fields

Frozen amidst the blur

Little structures like temples

Delicate and resilient

Ornate and simple

When the farmers die

Says the tour guide

Their children bury them in their fields

And build memorials to them

I struggle to imagine

An equivalent here

Of course we love

Our lost kith and kin

But lack a legacy

Of such touching diligence

Such dutiful spontaneity of feeling

Such ancestral honouring

Growing up  

My ideas of Vietnam

Came not from Hanoi

But Hollywood 

War as American tragedy

Naive, homespun GIs 

Relentlessly menaced

In mind and body

By an ever-surging

Alien horde

Degenerate shadows

Deserving only of slaughter

For inflicting such trauma

On the Land of the Free

For ageing the New World’s

Innocent psyche

Yet we found no malignant spirits

No celluloid nightmares

Only a people

With infinite capacity

For warmth and enterprise

Hospitality and ingenuity

Undimmed through centuries 

Of invasion and occupation

War and totalitarianism

Their serenity and industry

Love and endurance

Eternally captured

In tantalising glimpses

Brief, heart-stopping

Of miniature mausoleums

In familial rice fields

- Stephen Barnaby