‘In a Room of One Thousand Buddhas’

For poet Monica Sok, writing is a form of offering. “My family is culturally Theravada Buddhist,” she told the Adroit Journal. “Growing up, we would leave offerings of fruit and water on the table. . . . I’d like to think that every ordinary thing we do is ritual. My poems, the act of writing itself. Laughter. Nourishment. Any kindness. Anything that opens up a portal.”

The daughter of Cambodian refugees who escaped from Phnom Penh and resettled in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Sok turned to poetry as a way of unearthing her own family history and interrogating the US government’s role in the genocide of Cambodian people under the Khmer Rouge regime. Her debut collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, mythologizes her own family’s narrative in a haunting portrait of generational trauma, collective memory, and the ongoing work of healing. The poems follow Sok’s travels to historic sites and war museums in Siem Reap, with one poem even repurposing—as Sok says, reincarnating—Henry Kissinger’s order for a bombing campaign. “I hope my language is the kind of weapon that disarms other weapons,” Sok says. “Not to cause any more harm, but to take away weapons, break down walls.”

–Sarah Fleming

The water in my heart was falling. To my right
a row of Buddhas in meditation
sheltered by the Naga snake but this snake was real,
unlike the American and the heads in his cabinet.
The Naga protected the Buddha from rain,
spread its seven hoods to keep him dry.
And did I tell you it was raining all day?
I bought a poncho to ride around Siem Reap.
Rain during the dry season. Buddha calling on the earth
for witness. Something water protectors
at Standing Rock are doing right now. Protecting water
because water is life. But a night of rubber bullets
and tear gas and water hoses, that is not life.
Today, too, while I ate breakfast noodles in my hotel
neo-Nazis saluted back home in Harrisburg.
They were not calling on the earth, their palms up
but facing down. Looking at the Buddhas,
I thought, They look like me.
Some with broader shoulders, some from pre-Angkorian
and Angkorian times, some from this century,
four sitting back to back in a circle,
each in different mudras. Sandstone. Wood. Stone.
Depending on what was available
or how kings chose to perpetuate who they worshipped.
Sitting on the coils of the Naga. Eyes closed.
Or looking down. Some look scared. Calm.
Some with hands missing or cracked down the side.
Some look starved. Their clothes shattered.
One, wooden, was defaced standing.
Except for a small curve of lip and one shut left eye.
There are others, smaller, small as people.

♦

From A Nail the Evening Hangs On, copyright 2020 by Monica Sok, used by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.