Cambodia Seems Dusty
To you whom God calls here
Does the day start when the roosters crow?
Seems so:
The day awakes before the
sun.
The sun is strong,
the rain is strong,
and the heat
is strong.
In the villages, the people are friendly—
and weathered.
And everyone comes from the
villages,
Where the rice fields lie flat
lollipopped with
coconut
trees
and palm
trees.
The buildings are bold
bright
blue and red
and
orange and
green and
traffic
median-paint yellow.
The buildings are muted
wood and
faded thatch,
rusty metal
roofs.
The background is bright
rice-green
to shame lawn-care,
tropically flowering-fruiting-and-flourishing
forests and
fields,
farms,
yards, gardens, and
painted pots.
The background is drab
dust-ridden
paved roads,
dust-red
dirt roads,
bare-trampled
yards,
and
construction zones.
The people are rich
See the
thousand rooftops
‘round the
royal palace?
The people are poor
we see the young
ones,
see the old
ones on the street.
The past is bleak—years
of power
struggles,
land-grabbing,
and terror.
The past is glorious—because…
Who has
built such temples?
The future is dark—fears
of
corruption and prostitution
ever
ensnaring,
stripping
the richness of the
land
from all people and
twisting
it into the
pockets
of
a few.
The future is bright—because…
The people
are building,
The church
is dawning,
And after all,
what is the miracle of man but
bones out of
dust,
tendons out of dust,
flesh out of dust,
beating
heart full of dust dissolved in rain,
running
red only by the hands of
God?
And we know:
God’s hands are still moving,
And Cambodia
has a lot of dust.
Christmas 2011
Christmas 2011
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