(Editor’s note: Here at Hope Ink, we celebrate all kinds of writing. While we are generally article-heavy, we are pleased to have poet Brianna Tongen contribute. She was a student on on the January 2009 Discipleship Training School with YWAM Pismo Beach in California, and her travels in India and Myanmar inspired the following poems. She is now a student at Northwestern College in Minnesota, and her poem “Virtues of Vaseline” is being published in the school’s literary magazine Inkstone.)

Photo provided by Kellie Linder.

Rainy Season Rising

Sometimes the monks rode on top of trucks,
Their robes blowing back.
Blur. Beetle-nut color.
The superhero capes of Myanmar at superhero speeds.
It was natural to kneel here.
Water from the rain sat smooth upon the tiles.
The bare feet of monks and merit-seekers move slow.
Incense and jasmine lilt
upon the softer fog of the rainy season rising,
and I prayed too.

Their hands as they put them together
touched ephemeral.
If this falls through;
There are always golden owls.
There are always bells.

Easter Drama in India

Our Jesus hadn’t eaten for a couple of days.
Traveler’s sickness was pulling out his strength. The black
shirts were all too quiet for Calcutta: City of Color.

Our Jesus broke his heart easier this morning.
His tired arms fell from the cross with relief, readiness
to be held to our dust. For a few measures,
it was good Friday. It was the slums of this city
fifty years ago; the trafficked girls in San Francisco;
the Karen fleeing into Thailand.

While he hung his head, while the music slowed,
the Holocaust itself descended upon his shoulders like the last plague
of Egypt- and in this way, every event of earth connects.
He started to breathe.
Inhale. Beat, Exhale. I maybe heard the curtain ripping.

That carefully preserved canvas of blood. Ripping. And the Levites
pulling at their hair in horror- The Holy leaking out everywhere.
A downbeat and explode. The cave went supernova and the thick fumes
of Uganda, Palestine, and the Bolshevik revolution
were sucked into the nether-space.

Watermelons in India

We ate with our hands as the Bengali woman taught us.
It was late at night and loud with honking taxis in the heat.
I don’t think I was remotely hungry, but it is rude not to eat.
Even more rude if there are people starving down the block.
After rice and roti, she gave us watermelon.
But India was bananas and mangoes to me.
Watermelon meant the fourth of July back home.
For barbeques and the picnics of people who wear sweaters at night
and drive home on quiet streets.
Tonight I know that watermelon was made for India.
It was a clean chance at hydration.
It was all over my face.
I swallowed the seeds, and I saw how badly the watermelon
would like to populate the earth.
Just so the kids dying from holy rivers
would have something sweet to quench their thirst.

Virtues of Vaseline

It takes movement to lift a child. Awe to watch him sleep.
I am no physician, but my father is.
That seemed to be enough. Thrust into a closet with metal cabinets.
Prescriptions. Medicine, expired, in Hindi, in German, in Spanish.
A bottle of clean water.
The train station kids came in one by one.
Presented their battle wounds. The battle of living
on a crowded and careless earth. Vaseline. Gauze.

We can use those for anything. Most of the kids still wanted a bandage.
I had nothing to make them not hurt.
Glue, they said. That is another thing we can use for almost anything.
They were exhausted at mid-day because guards catch them at night.
Make them leave, hit them with sticks. My sister sat on the floor,
instantly had three heads on her lap, the children wanting to sleep
just once under benevolent hands.

I knew that if she would simply wash her eye in decent water,
the infection would fade. She said she would not.
I used Vaseline.
One of the kids was trying to choke the other. Had him flat
amid the scarred building blocks, I shouted because a child
was in my arms, and my brother pulled the aggressor away and fell
to his knees before him, murmuring “Oh no, no don’t be this way. Please.”

I prayed for a visual gift of tongues to read the medicine bottles.
Checked again. No good. Excuse me; did they by chance have antibiotics?
No. Vaseline then. I prayed for God to make it sting.
When I had heads in my lap like that, nestling into my legs,
I would have disarmed a mad Calcutta taxi.
I would have done it without waking the darlings.