[— also because surely music is
important to our tale. Because even
before we had story we had song:
there is a tradition of sung-poetry —
ca dao — familiar to our people. We
sang those poems while working in
fields and kitchens, while resting
on river banks or recovering from
battles, in contemplation of work,
war, love, family, nature, time, the
passage of time. We sang unaccompanied
by any instrumentation but
for our raw, unadorned voices; and
by this method had learned to order
our lives (and our comprehension of
what it meant to be living) according
to tonal structures. & before we had
language ((those relics we now call
words)) surely we must’ve begun
with the tones alone — nonconsonant,
guttural and fundamental,
falling or rising, submissive or dissident
— to evoke an aural palette to
say <<to sing…>> where and how
we had come before. We intoned all
of our need for telling. This was back
before they — certain inclined ones
of us — discovered how to snatch
the tones, as well as the words, from
the air and concretize them into
shapes, symbols, notes. Our voices
now subverted : into materia. So that
now when I write I know it to be but
a substitute for the singing that once
was enough between us.

]

~ from We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, (p. 54)

Mountain mother mourning all her rivers

that flow with the blood of soldiers

Dragon father you always were so restless

so you took half of the children & you led them South

to the seashore

Mother she is crying but her tears fall as drops of ink

so Mother she cries a newspaper & her sorrow is

only documentary newsreels tell me

what to feel because i don’t know what is real

t.v. communicates our rage but a death count is

all that speaks our sadness

~from “Origin Tale”, East/West