Unpredictable - a poem revisited.

I've finally got round to some revising - a poem I wrote in Vietnam, in the heat and humidity of our first days there, before I'd settled into accepting it all. I was put off by the comments of someone I'd considered a sympathetic critic - made the mistake of letting him see the raw first draft. However, re-reading it and changing the structure more than the content, I find it recreates the moment, the strangeness, the otherness. So here it is, more than I year after I first wrote it.

Unpredictable

The lawns of rice deceive the eye
until one sees unwillingly
the ditches and the depth
and something strange and out of place

like graves or shrines in centre-field
and recognises foreign-ness
as tangled in this alien world
as mats of green inexorably
drifting on the muddy tide, which
people eat, like snakes in wine
and scorpions, and spiders piled
in glistening heaps to tempt the eye.
And flowing round the air’s embrace
is heavy with the drifting smoke
of stubble burning in the fields
beyond the river’s parapet where
sunset comes before its hour.
A song comes from a hidden bank
and cattle, golden in the light
descend to drink and all is strange
and lushly vibrant in the dusk.

C.M.M. Vietnam 03/15