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How to Defeat Pol Pot

Posted by Bunkong Tuon | Aug 26, 2024 | Poetry | 1 |

How to Defeat Pol Pot

Call your children by their true names. 
Love. Divine. Angels. My heart.

Be gentle with them.
Speak the truth:

They were born out of love.
These divine creatures. 

Tell them the Angkor Empire stood
for six hundred years.

America is half that age.
Read to them Khmer poetry.

Show them Apsaras dancing on temple walls.
Pick up a paintbrush, play an instrument.

Let the soul sing its songs.
The Khmer Rouge made angels of us all. 

We soared over killing fields
to find home on foreign shores.

Keep memories of the victims in songs and prayers,
in the spoonful of rice we feed our children.

Sing to the moon for what it witnessed.

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About The Author

Bunkong Tuon

Bunkong Tuon

BUNKONG TUON is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize–winning poet, and professor who teaches at Union College in Schenectady. His work has appeared in World Literature Today, Copper Nickel, New York Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, diode poetry, Verse Daily, among others. His Greatest Hits chapbook, What Is Left, was published by Jacar Press in March 2024. His debut novel, Koan Khmer (Northwestern/Curbstone Press), will be published in August 2014. He is poetry editor of Cultural Daily.

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1 Comment

  1. marijo grogan
    marijo grogan on August 27, 2024 at 10:57 am

    How important it is to remember our ancestors in this beautiful way
    especially those who were taken before their time by cruel means.
    This is a powerful reminder that honors their memories.

    Reply

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The Braided Way is a framework to see every faith tradition as a strand, braided into a larger whole of spiritual awareness. In the Braided Way, combining spiritual practice from various faiths allow us to explore sacred experience and wonder in forms that resonate with our personal spiritual needs and sacred intuitions. In today’s culture, many people shun religious dogma, but yearn for spiritual connection. The Braided Way allows the ceremonies and practices of multiple faiths to be available without the confinements of cultural dogma.

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