Cambodia Seems Dusty (Poem)

I wrote this poem as a Christmas present to the Suh family, who are Christian Reformed World Mission's full-time missionaries in Cambodia. (Note: Most of the text effects are working okay in this format, though not all. I should probably learn how to edit HTML at some point)

Cambodia Seems Dusty

To you whom God calls here

Does the day start when the roosters crow?

Seems so:

The day awakes before the sun.

The sun is strong,

the rain is strong,

and the heat is strong.

In the villages, the people are friendly—

and weathered.

And everyone comes from the villages,

Where the rice fields lie flat

lollipopped with

coconut trees

and palm trees.

The buildings are bold

bright

blue and red and

orange and green and

traffic median-paint yellow.

The buildings are muted

wood and faded thatch,

rusty metal roofs.

The background is bright

rice-green to shame lawn-care,

tropically flowering-fruiting-and-flourishing

forests and fields,

farms, yards, gardens, and

painted pots.

The background is drab

dust-ridden paved roads,

dust-red dirt roads,

bare-trampled yards,

and construction zones.

The people are rich

See the thousand rooftops

‘round the royal palace?

The people are poor

we see the young ones,

see the old ones on the street.

The past is bleak—years

of power struggles,

land-grabbing,

and terror.

The past is glorious—because…

Who has built such temples?

The future is dark—fears

of corruption and prostitution

ever ensnaring,

stripping the richness of the

land from all people and

twisting it into the

pockets

of a few.

The future is bright—because…

The people are building,

The church is dawning,

And after all,

what is the miracle of man but

bones out of dust,

tendons out of dust,

flesh out of dust,

beating heart full of dust dissolved in rain,

running red only by the hands of

God?

And we know:

God’s hands are still moving,

And Cambodia has a lot of dust.