Long Hanoi Poems
Long Hanoi Poems. Below are the most popular long Hanoi by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Hanoi poems by poem length and keyword.
Rice paddy wakes up ready to be planted.
Where are those lazy farmers?
Snicker laughs. Nothing lazy about them.
They are the most cheerful workers she knows
She feels swampy today, colder than usual
The plow is heading her way,
She can see it a bit past the tiered fields
Golden streams snaking through tall verdant grasses
She waves, but pointed bamboo hat man does not see
He is getting older, slower,
He does not bend as long over her as he used to
Gets more angry about the menacing rats too
Losing his grip in some ways
She learned that her sake is a hit in the west
No surprise to her.
Japan, Hanoi and Vietnam love it, don’t they?
She has heard old coolie brag about her rice, more than any other paddy.
Rice Paddy watches him turn the plow over to his son
Son is lazy. Should be getting plow himself.
Spends too much time over nothing.
How will she fare when Old Man Farmer is no longer of this world?
She bows to him as he enters her waters, knowing she will miss him terribly.
The Man She Buried
She buried her husband decades ago
He died fighting a needless war
Held prisoner for so many years
He wrote to her every day
Yet, she never heard a word
Her two children never knew their father
They were told stories
But, they never knew for sure
Over time she lived her life
As he became a distant memory
The a day came when a canvas bag arrived
A thousand letters were poured onto the floor
Each one was sent from a cage in Hanoi
Addressed to her, but never sent
She read each one through tear-filled eyes
And as the last letter was put back in the envelope
She fell in love one again
And again she mourned the man she buried so long ago
Rice paddy wakes up ready to be planted.
Where are those lazy farmers?
Snicker laughs. Nothing lazy about them.
They are the most cheerful workers she knows
She feels swampy today, colder than usual
The plow is heading her way,
She can see it a bit past the tiered fields
Golden streams snaking through tall verdant grasses
She waves, but pointed bamboo hat man does not see
He is getting older, slower,
He does not bend as long over her as he used to
Gets more angry about the menacing rats too
Losing his grip in some ways
She learned that her sake is a hit in the west
No surprise to her.
Japan, Hanoi and Vietnam love it, don’t they?
She has heard old coolie brag about her rice, more than any other paddy.
Rice Paddy watches him turn the plow over to his son
Son is lazy. Should be getting plow himself. Spends too much time over nothing.
How will she fare when Old Man Farmer is no longer of this world?
She bows to him as he enters her waters, knowing she will miss him terribly.
Once, they claimed to hold the torch,
To light the world with truth and reason.
But the West’s media empire—
Was born not in truth,
But in treason.
From BBC’s royal scripts,
To CNN’s manicured myths,
From Fox’s fury-laced fables,
To NBC’s polished distortions—
They were trained, not to inform,
But to perform
For the empire's applause.
Every lens tilted,
Every headline coded,
Every silence calculated—
To shape the world
In a mirror that flatters the North
And shames the South.
Africa—your beauty drowned in dust,
Your children shown in flies and famine.
No word of your wisdom, your gold,
Your thinkers, your songs,
Your revolutions and sacred soil.
Only "chaos," "war," and "tribe"
Like shadows on a cave wall.
Asia—painted with dragon breath and fear,
Latin America—forever "corrupt,"
Middle East—where "terror" walks with every name,
And yet no mirror turned
To NATO's blood-soaked hands,
To sanctions that starve,
To drone strikes in dawn’s silence.
The Global South has turned the dial.
We do not listen,
Not because we cannot hear—
But because we now know.
We are not fooled
By the Oxford accent of a liar.
We are not convinced
By statistics that reek of empire.
We see your scripts,
Your cutting rooms,
Your photos cropped like colonial maps.
Truth is rising in Timbuktu,
In Caracas, in Kerala,
In Harare, and Hanoi.
And you, Western media,
Are being archived—
Filed away in the dustbin of history
Where all fallen empires rot.
The world is watching,
But not through your eyes anymore.
Our leaders who are Caucasians
On some previous occasions
Would A-bomb Japan
And Viet Nam hides tan
But hate all bias against Asians
Author's comment: Hate crime is always bad. Here's an idea for a political cartoon:
Frame 1: Truman and advisors celebrate the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with laughter and joy even though those targets were not military and innocent civilians died.
Frame 2: LBJ and Nixon celebrate with the military and their suppliers over dropping bombs on Hanoi.
Frame 3: The same people claim outrage after any act of violence against an asian here.
(In Tudu Hospital in the former Saigon,
several hundred dead babies have been
preserved in formaldehyde. They are
hideously deformed as a result of their
mothers having been contaminated by
Agent Orange, a chemical diffused in
Vietnam as part of the American military
offensive, Operation Ranch Hand.)
Things To Do
Everything's sterile. The quiet reek
of formaldehyde seeps from neat shelves.
Tall glass jars, the size of mega-buckets
of Colonel's chicken, line the walls
floor to ceiling. Let's take a look, friend.
Downtown Hanoi, at a loose end,
we'll see the sights.
But they won't see us.
These fetuses and newborn babes
gaze out uncomprehending,
the faintest hint of surprise
darkening their big bug eyes.
Here, a head is elongated like squash.
There, a tongue cascades from a mouth
to fuse with a sternum. Tiny heads
hone to a point, like someone tried
to put them through a pencil-sharpener.
Faces that will never blink look out
and seem to ask, rhetorically,
if this was really meant to be.
By what rule of law or war,
by what technological advance
could it have served somebody's end
to make us monsters,
before we even had the chance
to be born?
our mouth owes a debt to your buried bones
a hot lead cracked in a jiffy,
and your brain splashed~
in the thick forest of Hanoi,
with the stains sucked by soil
as a flow thicker than water.
many blood stains on our flags
made too heavy for the wind to blow,
yet draped on your casket with full honour
cleaned by the courage interred six feet below.
many souls lost, many heroes born,
though mostly written as epitaphs
still posthumous respect holds on,
despite the strong winds of
forgetfulness
that grow like thick bushes
around your grave, but
couldn't stop the smile
in black and white,
framed
in carved oakwood.
your M16, with the last fingerprinted round,
still stands beside Uncle John's M60~
a quiet testament that friendship
has risen far beyond the soil,
toward the vaulted hush above,
where great warriors are welcomed
among the watchful sentinels
of the heavenly hosts~
the armed battalions of angels.
1. To Fly
My father was an admiral, and so
I joined the Navy. Back in fifty-eight
to be a pilot seemed the way to go:
ship-sailors were committed to a crate.
Scrub decks? Paint rusting gunwales? That’s a ‘no’.
The Skyhawk was my weapon (and my fate!)
2. Rubicon Crossing
Some nations follow rainbows, I am told:
we thought, in Vietnam, ‘search and destroy’
would lead us to our fabled pot of gold.
For years we tried it, but it brought no joy:
we lost our nerve, and switched to ‘clear and hold’.
Saigon endured the selfsame end as Troy.
3. Brainwash
The Hanoi Hilton. Yes, I was a guest.
They found my father was a VIP,
and left off hurting me. Impressed,
they wanted to restore my liberty.
But if I left my buddies, I’d detest
myself. I turned them down. That’s decency!
4. Frozen Side of the Sun
Should politicians simply sing the song?
A woman voter told me, in the hall,
Obama was a Muslim. I said, “Wrong!”
I guess I lost her vote. I made the call
I knew was the correct one. I was strong.
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.
As a child, men of science warned me.
About the coming of a second ice age.
They flashed pictures of stomping mastodons,
hungry saber-tooth cats.
Giant sloths with enormous claws.
I was all in and took quick action.
I learned how to build an igloo.
By stuffing snow into hollow plastic blocks.
I sharpened the end of dozens of sticks.
To do battle with the giant cats and mastodons.
Now, Bill Nye, Mr. Gore and Hanoi Jane.
Shake a crooked finger
Warn of global warming and biblical flooding.
I'm taking them seriously.
So, I'm stockpiling tuna fish, beer and seed.
And building a tiny ark just for three.
As I'll never have two of everything.
There's only the cat, an olive-eyed dove and me.