A Prayer in Bangkok

A rebirth, the soul imprisoned within a body. / Yet could that not also be a blessing?

I’m currently in Hong Kong, the last stop in my three-month itinerary outside mainland China. Next week I’ll be back in Beijing. For now, a poem written from Bangkok, where I attended the wedding of Sam and Pew in December with an assortment of old China friends who long ago left the country.

A Prayer in Bangkok

We should, in this place of four hundred temples,
the city of angels, pray a little, say Thank you
for all our privileges, but no god would understand
what we were asking of them. What disaster could they conjure,
a lost passport or sudden rainstorm, to appease our conscience?
A rebirth, the soul imprisoned within a body.
Yet could that not also be a blessing?
To be a duck in Rotterdam, a deer in Nara?
A return to life and then just living,
no need for thanks.
I know this is a stretch but I’ll say it anyway,
not all temples are humanmade. I’ve seen the way
palm trees bend and blind cubs reach for their mother,
of corals and flowstone and sinkholes,
or the way we look at each other sometimes, even strangers.
How, floating on the sea’s surface, we cross our arms
in a gesture even fish might recognize.