Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag

By Bruce Weigl b. 1949 Bruce Weigl

Because this evening Miss Hoang Yen

sat down with me in the small

tiled room of her family house

I am unable to sleep.

We shared a glass of cold and sweet water.

On a blue plate her mother brought us

cake and smiled her betel-black teeth at me

but I did not feel strange in the house

my country had tried to bomb into dust.

In English thick and dazed as blood

she told me how she watched our planes

cross her childhood’s sky,

all the children of Hanoi

carried in darkness to mountain hamlets, Nixon’s

Christmas bombing. She let me hold her hand,

her shy unmoving fingers, and told me

how afraid she was those days and how this fear

had dug inside her like a worm and lives

inside her still, won’t die or go away.

And because she’s stronger, she comforted me,

said I’m not to blame,

the million sorrows alive in her gaze.

With the dead we share no common rooms.

With the frightened we can’t think straight;

no words can bring the burning city back.

Outside on Hung Dao Street

I tried to say good-bye and held her hand

too long so she looked back through traffic

towards her house and with her eyes

she told me I should leave.

All night I ached for her and for myself

and nothing I could think or pray

would make it stop. Some birds sang morning

home across the lake. In small reed boats

the lotus gatherers sailed out

among their resuming white blossoms.

Hanoi, 1990

Bruce Weigl, “Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag” from Archaeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Bruce Weigl. Reprinted with the permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc., www.groveatlantic.com.

Source: Archeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems (Grove/Atlantic Inc., 1999)

Biography

Soon after turning eighteen, Bruce Weigl enlisted in the Army and served in Vietnam for one year, beginning in December 1967. He was awarded the Bronze Star and returned to his hometown of Lorain, Ohio, where he enrolled in Lorain County Community College. As Weigl states in his best-selling prose memoir, The Circle of Hanh (2000), “The paradox of my life as a writer is that the war ruined my life and in return gave me my . . .

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