Vietnamese Poetry--- To Restart by Mai Van Phan

Explicated by Dr Ramesh Mukhopadhyaya

A harvested field

A stork swoops down

An unkempt dawn

Explication

The phrase harvested field  narrates the story of a field. Seeds were sown and plants grew thereof and bore rich wealth of crops in that field.The crops were   gathered and removed from the field. So the harvested field presents before us the portrait of a field which is bereft  of the harvest it produced. We do see in our minds eye the remains of the scissored plants that had borne rich crop littered in the field. This is not a pleasant sight.It speaks of the cupidity of man who robs the earth of its wealth. I t  might stand for a country that has been looted by the coloniser. And there a stork swoops down.The harvested field is still life. It has been juxtaposed by a stork swooping down. To swoop down means to come down upon something in a sudden swift attack.A stork  is a bird having long necks and long bills. And when it swoops upon a harvested field it is an uncanny sight. Because a stork is a wading   bird   busy searching its prey in waters and marshy lands .Why does it swoop upon a harvested land? Are the marshy lands destroyed already? Are waterscapes on earth contracting? Or else  the poem tells us the story of a country looted by one set of colonizers and then further attacked by  another set of invaders who  enact air strikes? One wonders when does the action take place. Such events could happen in the dark of the night or may be  during the evening. But contrary to the readers expectation the action takes place at dawn or day break . The dawn is the beginning of a day. A field the harvest of which has been cropped off  if attacked suddenly from the skies  espied at dawn is no good omen. Hence the poem is clinched up with the  comment---An unkempt dawn.

A powerful poem that evokes in us  an eerie sensation