The Road to Siem Reap

Listening to Vaughan Williams as I am borne along 

a Cambodian highway

the red dust billowing at our passing

I hear the cool, silver tones

of choristers in the echoing chill of

vaulted stone and know

as never before

the music rooted in the land

of its gestation.  A white ox

wanders over dusty grass

as the road beneath our wheels

Turns to dry, rutted mud

and the red cloud envelops

two small determined girls

emerging from a school

as crisply clad as if they too 

could sing qui tollis peccata

with the boys whose voices sound

a million lives away.

C.M.M. 03/15

I actually wrote this on a bus - an air-conditioned coach - on a six-hour journey over roads of varying degrees of completion through Cambodia. I scribbled it on the back of a daily bulletin in handwriting that I could barely decipher and transcribed it onto my phone notes when we stopped. I was listening at the time to Vaughan Williams' Mass in G minor, consumed by the strangeness of the contrast between what I heard and what I was seeing.