Blind Tears

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One hundred Cambodian women living in California are blind even though physiologically there is nothing wrong with their sight. Doctors call this seeing disability “hysterical blindness.” 
—News story 

From that first dark day 
the Khmer Rouge, 
a scourge of scarlet locusts, 

drove us like cattle 
into the countryside. 
The rivers ran red, 

the bodies of my people 
floating like dead fish 
on the water. The sky 

was the color of dried wounds 
as rice fields yielded their corpses 
from shallow graves, 

their clouded eyes blind 
to the harvest of dark blisters 
ripening on the killing fields. 

For many months I prayed 
to Buddha to give me death, 
to bind my eyes with darkness

that I would see no more, 
but my body was filled with eyes 
and I could not escape seeing. 

There was never enough food. 
When I saw my children’s eyes, 
watery as our thin rice broth, 

I traded diamonds for milk, 
a gold bracelet for one sweet potato, 
and my wedding ring for a cup of rice. 

My children caught frogs 
along the river bank 
and tiny green locusts in trees. 

We ate red ants, rats, 
roots, leaves, and bitter bark. 
Water lily stalks were a delicacy. 

When at night my husband 
stole carrots and cabbage 
from the village garden 

the soldiers beat him with sticks 
and threw him bound into a fire. 
I tried to cover my children’s eyes, 

but the soldiers forced us 
to watch and a black mist 
began to rise before me. 

As my children grew thinner, 
their cries invaded my sleep 
and I awoke in their ravening dreams.

I dug worms and dung beetles, 
boiled leaves for tea and 
gave my body to the village leader 

for one sack of rice. All this I 
could see until the woman in the 
next hut kept her baby when it died 

then she too ate like the crows and 
wolves, like the vultures that circled 
all day in the darkening sky. 

When my sister went blind 
they accused her of deception 
and tied her in a graveyard 

where ghosts cried all night long, 
weeping for their lost ones 
under a blood-red moon. 

When she saw our grandmother’s ghost 
and cried out, they killed her with a 
pickaxe and left her with no stone. 

One by one, all my little ones 
perished before my sight. Some died 
of starvation and others of dysentery. 

I tried to do koktchai for each one, 
to send them on to the next world 
in the proper way, but even this 

was forbidden. My son who was 
impaled on spears of bamboo 
for stealing an extra bowl of soup

and my little granddaughter 
whom the soldiers beat against 
a tamarind tree. 

I buried them all— 
at Viel Trumph, and Prey Veng, 
at Battambang and all along the Mekong. 

When I became too weak to work 
in the fields, they put me in charge 
of digging children’s graves. 

I dug each one slowly, for I could 
barely see by now, spooning the 
dark earth tenderly, then 

wrapping the small bodies 
in whatever I could find, sometimes 
only paper or leaves, 

and laying them in the ground. 
At the end, my sight completely gone, 
I did all this by touch, 

feeling for the softest ground, 
making sure the children’s eyes 
were closed, and then covering them 

with earth. Although it was forbidden, 
for some 1 placed a flower or planted 
a seed, and once or twice I even 

rocked them for a few moments 
and kissed them goodbye 
before 1 laid them softly down.