ON SUNDAYS
On Sundays students who can afford to,
take English lessons to work
for parents who work
in English because English
is where the money is. But
she doesn’t teach English, Sundays
she walks two miles deeper
from the building, where she lives
with other teachers, to find
students weaving bamboo baskets
while watching younger siblings, then
walks between rice fields to
rice fields to find their parents.
And waits. At break or lunch
under a tree, she listens to them
say, the words don’t feed
the stomach. Yet she comes
so that by evening, when they arrive
home, they find her in the yard
drawing words on the dirt
while students work and watch
and say. Then they eat dinner.
Over rice and yam, boiled water
cress and salted radish, they find
other things that feed the stomach:
the height she’s gained with mud
sticking to her thongs; or, as the children
say it, their heads thrown back
in open-mouth laugh, the bamboo snapped
at her weaving; or the way “l”
is tall and skinny, and then “b”
is “l” with their father’s stomach. Soon
her students come to class
because the teacher is nice
and parents don’t want her
to walk so far on Sundays.
(Poem by Nhan Trinh)
