Arms out like wings

Có chí làm quan, có gan làm giàu.
Vietnamese proverb, Fortune favors the brave.

Sokół antique motorcycle

Happy Poetry Friday! People are sooo interesting, aren't they? I just love hearing stories, everybody's stories. One of my father's cousins was a motorcycle racer, until he lost a foot doing it. Here's a poem by Hoa Nguyen, who says her mother "left home at 15 and joined a circus and became a motorcycle stunt-woman in Vietnam in the early 1960s. She did these amazing things contrary to what her position as a poor woman, born in 1942 in the Mekong Delta, should have been.” (I feel like this poem -- and last week's -- would be good mentor poems to encourage high school students to write about their ancestors...or perhaps historical figures.)


My Idea of the Circus Is My Idea of the Circus Otherwise Known As: My Mother Was a Celebrated Stunt Motorcyclist, Vietnam, 1958 to 1962
by Hoa Nguyen

Very loud    a mad frenzy     The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared

(I first wrote “road”)
Left home to join the circus: 15 years old

You enter at the bottom and wind upwards
in spirals    the bike climbing the sides

You enter the barrel on a Peugeot
with automatic tied down handles

I mean the kind that you can peg
so you can ride hands-free

arms out like wings on either side...


read the rest here

**************

TeacherDance has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Linda!