Festival of lights

There's always a period of curious fear

between the first sweet-smelling breeze

and the time when the rain

comes cracking down.

Don Delillo

I'm thinking a lot about my friends in Thailand right now, especially the Bangkok crew. This week is the Loy Kratong festival, one of the most beautiful celebrations in a country of many breathtaking traditions. Every year when the moon is full and the rainy season comes to a close, Thailand’s rivers and canals fill with millions of kratongs, floating lotus-shaped lanterns. The tradition, centuries old, is meant to placate the country’s goddess of water.

My first Loy Kratong celebration was eleven years ago; we were invited to a friends’ house and when we arrived, her entire family was there, the living floor strewn with banana leaves and bright yellow marigolds. We spent the entire afternoon building our banana leaf floats, decorating them with flowers, incense sticks, and candles. As soon as the sun went down, we gathered along the banks of the Wang River that ran through our town and let go of our kratongs, making a wish and watching them drift out to join a parade of candlelight making its way down the river.

I know this year will be especially poignant for so many Thais with floods still threatening the provinces. Earlier this year, with the Red Shirt riots raging, I wrote this poem and somehow it seems fitting months later, with the sadness that still blankets the country. But from what I’ve heard from friends still living there, this year’s Festival of Lights was just as spectacular as ever.

curious fear

this isn’t your milk & honey wilderness

this is tongues-on-grass

and tracer fire

these magnesium ghosts

breathing crimson

across the riverbank

a kingdom, a cabaret,

a translucent sheet of cloth

this is memory

and monkey-shine,

a camera-eye invention

your helicopter patio

too close now

to petrol paraffin

and a matchbox sky

this is your seven-colored

shadow dance

stained plasmic by spirits

too unruly for these

tender-hearted houses

sweep up a garland of chicken bones

and a single cigarette

still burning days after

these savage rains

who are these slash-and-burn warriors

trespassing your buffalo folklore

as june’s clouds

pummel the pockmarked streets?

land of tears, you whisper

and the firecracker-madness

floods the sky once again