International Poetry Competition
Grand Prize Winner: 2007
Flower Bomb
by Vuong Quoc Vu
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Great Poetry
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Relax!
Home Pond
…the bomb
also
is
a flower
—William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
My brother, come home from war,
sits now for hours in the garden.
I see now, he says, everything
as flowers, the tendency of all things
to bloom—even the way the body bleeds,
the fire from guns, the sun unfurling
after the longest night. Everything blooms.
Brother, he says, I saw so many dead
I’ve realized the body is, after all,
above all, a fragile flowery thing.
Despite the marble column of its spine,
the great architecture of how it stands,
the arches and taut ropes of muscle,
it is easily torn apart, gunned through,
drowned, and plowed under,
how it withers with time and hunger.
When I saw the dead, I didn’t look
at faces and never, never into the eyes.
I avoided all implications of a soul, a name.
I looked at hands—those miracles of sinew
and veins—and imagined them to be leaves.
I have seen severed hands
as if they’d fallen from a tree,
hands crushed and burned crisp.
I have seen wounds on them
like purple trillium forced through the skin.
I have seen blood that spilled and splattered
like asters, the plum colors of viscera.
Brother, I have come home from Hell.
How now shall I tell the story
of Man—the wars, wars, wars
until the end of time?
How now shall I tell, my mind
already a shattering lake of glass,
my heart bullet-
to write in blood or red rose petals?
Poetry Contest