Purple Resilience
BY HA KIET CHAU.
Wind grumbles & I sense it is bone-tired, howling & badmouthing
in the graveyard, frightening the dogs.
Thunder claps once, twice & the whole city is in disarray.
Hills eroded, lakes polluted, a flood of dead mackerel & match sticks.
Nine o’clock & sad, the old purple tree wants to be held so the wind
ribbons tightly around its trunk as clusters of plums burst.
A week now, I still can’t undo the damage from the fire.
Ba has been raking leaves & rubble, strategizing ninety-nine ways
to rebuild a home. Who better understand struggle than my father
who worked & sacrificed his entire life, only to lose it all in the end.
I show him the plums, ripe & plump as the sun, resurrected.
He inquires, is the purple tree still standing?
I nod & there’s that lightning-quick glint in his eye
as if time shifted backwards & he is thirty again,
as if he is Superman testing his strength in the mean streets
of Haiphong, hollering, get outta my way--
my father, an unstoppable force,
dream scheming, hustling after the impossible, as if all is not lost.
Ha Kiet Chau is the author of two poetry collections Eleven Miles to June (Green Writers Press 2021) and Woman Come Undone (Mouthfeel Press 2014). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and is a recipient of the 2014-2015 UCLA Extension Writers Program Scholarship and the 2023-2024 Bernice Ruben Arnold Award. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in New American Writing, Ploughshares, South Carolina Review, and The Margins, among others. Her YA novel in verse, Darling Winter, is forthcoming from Mouthfeel Press. Find Ha on Instagram @sweetpoeticsoo.