About the author
Tramy is a senior from Seattle who deeply cherishes the visual and literary arts, but shares a complicated relationship with them.
Description
This piece is from my first and only poetry course in college, which I took last Fall.
Inspired by Javier Zamora's poetry book, Unaccompanied, this poem, like many others I wrote for the course, calls upon lineage, rhythm, and wordplay. It directly invokes the Vietnamese proverb, "Uống nước nhớ nguồn,"—whose English translation constitutes the poem's italicized secondary spine—as a means to navigate and illustrate the embodied experience of diasporic inheritance.
Part narrative, part letter, part lesson, and even part incantation, the poem confronts and embraces the unacknowledged ghosts of my upbringing. From the palm fronds to the napalm. From the lotus flowers to the rugged boats. From the wings of swallows to the wings of planes. From the second tongue, the second life, and the second generation, to the realities of being a second witness to and a victim of assimilation.
They are the sources I remember in the presence of water. And they're in my bones, all of them.