As a child survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Chath pierSath could be understood as carrying burdens of adult violence and warfare.
The Echoes Lost to Wind, though, is about lost opportunities in love and the struggles in of making a meaningful life as a farmer.
In the Introduction, Jinx Davis (2023) quotes pierSath as describing the book’s poems as “echoes without a body, shape, or form” and as “a flow of thoughts in the world.” His is a world of ephemera and transience that he uses words to capture, not to stop or slow time because neither one is possible, but to preserve ideas somewhat temporally.
“Our World” opens with a snippet the poet read about an astronaut looking back at the Earth in wonderment. From this, he unfurls rambling thoughts about life and meaning:
when truthfully seen, life feels free to accept death without
any resistance or fight
He suggests that humans should strive for more than human pettiness but that may be outside the power of human ego. The work evokes something of Buddhist concepts of human reincarnation perhaps and the importance of letting go of personhood.
“Sixteen Years Later” describes the return of an American son to his homeland. His sister wants to turn their mother’s skeleton with the head facing westward, and he wants to turn her facing eastward. Her directionality of burial may have implications for her next life.
“Marianovna” focuses on the fluidity of adult sexuality. In one time period, the poet had an affair with an individual but has since discovered more about his own leanings and preferences. He writes:
I’ve known you all my life. In love, I
died a heterosexual, gay repressed man
homo watching you now from a distance
a silent member of the audience in the back
row approaching the microphone
a Marilyn Monroe in
a floating feathered coat, mid-way there,
butterflies applause you famous & fortunate
rooted elsewhere, now, uprooted here—
our terrible shared secret
Several of pierSath’s poems advocate for sexual freedom. “Hands That Aren’t Free” is presented through various individuals who engage with their own sexuality in different ways, some in cultural hiding, some living double lives, some in total disavowal. “The Mouth” describes wanting a world…
Where no one is condemned for speaking out
Their truth,
Without fear, without being voided or erased,
Dismissed like you’re stupid…
In “Silence’s Shadows,” the poet aspires to “a sexual life to its fullest, without fear or self-doubts, pretending.” There is a lament of the passing of sexual opportunity with aging past youth:
Silence’s shadows. Shadows silenced.
Hard working hands cracked warty palms
he enters loneliness, a private song of
a man who can’t find true love anywhere, openly man to man.
In “Wisdom,” the poet asserts:
The best way to die is to be served
as food for someone else.
The ideas echo some expressed in cyber backwaters.
“Longing” describes fantasies of a dream man, even as the poet knows how fantasies fall short. In this work, the poet celebrates his getting lucky once with a bartender in a SF bar. “A Crowd” has two people’s eyes meeting and a connection made. “Touch” suggests that people may connect through conversations and touch. “Pieces to Parts” describes the anticipation of a lover. “The Body” describes an ideal state of a person who is “bountiful in spirit, body, mind and soul,” not a person who is unaligned or unassimilated. “Childhood” suggests that for some, a childhood may occur later in life perhaps “when it’s safe.”
Yet, “Nowhere to Hide”—with its images of 9/11—show that freedom from war may be impossible even if humanity knows to value peace. In the evocatively described “Bird,” he muses on a dead bird with “no easy freedom or flight.” In “Silence,” the threat of death is ever present:
To die isn’t still
Death equals that of life
Death camouflages
Where it hides
In “Oh, Son of Earth,” the poet sees beyond his own struggles to those of others, too:
My own suffering & pain.
I see it now
A trillion grass seeds of sorrow & sadness
That knowledge leads to a fatigue:
I see it now,
A soul atop a pine,
Hawk’s eyes honing in on a prey,
Whose life is she going to take this time?
Who deserves more time to age?
I just want to go.
No more thinking too much of love,
or where I should belong,
With whom to build a life.
Where to work and be
A man of some worth
Even when life isn’t all that special.
Perhaps the poet has gone to fatalism, a self-fulfilling one. A satisfactory life is alluded to in “The Loneliest You’ll Ever Be.” pierSath shares the struggles of wanting to be part of a couple but not finding that other:
Of two selves,
The unbearable minimized
To die knowing you have lived
A life with someone else
You can talk to
Without being judged
Coupledom is seen as a safe space. Another safe space is the idea of melding body and soul with his mother. Perhaps when he was in-womb was when he felt most connected, in “Maybe Next Time.”
The poet’s loneliness is not truly assuaged in “Pornography,” “iPhone Sex Pro,” “Masturbation,” or “To Whom it May Concern.” Making true human connection is elusive.
“The Photograph” evokes an old-style Cambodia with encroaching modernity: of phones, global health (as in the fighting of HIV-AIDS), and the descent of multinational organizations on a war-torn and developing country with prescriptives and privilege. The Everyman loses out:
Suddenly, dollars showed up
to corrupt people of their dignity—even
their human worth.
A Lexus was used to commit a homicide.
My favorite beggar flattened, like a salamander
he suddenly got new arms and legs, his brain crushed.
He was always begging in front of the FCC.
Every year, since 1994,
I returned there with five dollars in his pouch.
One year, he wasn’t there
So I read of his demise in the
Cambodia Daily, the best free press
In the country, and Hun Sen had it
Murdered recently.
“The Photograph” sheds light on the game of political power.
still brutalizing the poor and powerless,
selling out Cambodia to communist
China, Mao’s Red Book of the dead.
Ancestral worshippers choked on their own incense.
Same old rhetoric, same old Lady Penh.
The children chant the Mandarin
Characters for Mao and Xi’s economic Belt Road,
learning the languages of their former colonizers,
oppressors & bombers.
In the name of an -ism &
intellectual exercises, whoever came in
made Khmer forget Khmer.
The poet credits his mother’s death with his own survival, in “Mother Spirit.” He writes:
I inherited nothing else,
but your tears and sadness.
Your solitude is now mine
at full force, lost in the woods
of inhumanities and human cruelty.
You said I must survive at all costs
so I did not knowing what price I had to pay.
His is a burdened life, perhaps with guilt and traumas. His existence is the deepest wish of his late beloved mother, but perhaps that is not enough. “The Law of Nature” is about being “born and blooded.”
People go to severe brutality when struggling over power, wiping out swaths of society (such as the intellectuals under the Khmer Rouge) and going to ideological extremes. There are those who come to Cambodia with perhaps positive intentions. In “Teary’s Self-Awakening,” a woman shares her profession of Christian faith with the poet. Perhaps she has something of a savior complex. She is evoked also as an American lawyer:
a Cambodian heroine
the dogs tear at her flesh
never her mind
in her lifetime she decided to fight for justice
It is unclear if she has an actual referent, or if she is an amalgam of characters, or if she is a fictional character.
In “Jerusalem,” the poet takes a controversial stance:
no other country
but Palestine exist here, and
all who live there her citizens
equally reaping the abundance of the ancient olives
still stand rooted as silent witnesses
to all the hatred that spilled so much blood for
Jerusalem.
In “Existence,” pierSath describes missing a family that could have been but was not his. He describes living a camouflaged life in different forms:
5.
A swimmer of high peak sky, limitless higher
swimming with crocodiles of the east
teaching parrots to imitate humans.
A happy destitute vagabond roaming
like a wizard foretold in ancient tales
I existed multiple lives eating mists and fogs
changing camouflages, free flow introspection,
hard at work against the boredom of life.
“A Whole Life’s Lot” apparently refers to a farming family for whom he has worked and some of the family dynamics. A life can be lived in very short order and have little to really show for it.
The poet is a patron in “Hunger.” He has “blood obligations” to a woman and her four children when she was left widowed by men who killed her husband. In this poem, he exhorts:
I say live, sister, live
live any moment of happiness you can
I’ll send the money you want
I’ve had enough of it—this elixir of life
It’s not all that great, even when I am hunger free
Farming to feed others
What I earn extra
you can have
There is a sense of jadedness, of seeing the limits of what life has to offer. Still, for all the struggles, the poet celebrates the seasons and cycles of life in “Light There”; life, death, and nature, in “Dawn”; and others.
Several works evoke a sense of drawing from real life and biography but without the full transmutation of the work into art that has relevance for others. “The Lover” describes an affair between an architect and a medical doctor, who is serving jail time for criminal acts. “Long Distance Romance” describes two people connecting over phone lines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chath pierSath was born in Battambang, Cambodia, in 1970. He has written three prior collections of poems (After Poems, The Body Mystery: Paintings and Poems, and On Earth Beneath Sky: Poems and Sketches). pierSath is a visual artist. He works on a family farm in central Massachusetts. Echoes Lost to Wind was published in 2023.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
