By Tararith Kho
Flourishing through every season, at all times fresh:
Angkor flower, clinging fast,
You sow your perfume and our hearts are sated.
We know your fragrance as the deepest touch;
Not a screen to hide the body— It stills our limbs, and we
are taken.
There is nothing that can shake the hearts lodged within it.
This perfume wakes the feelings;
Out of the quiet, we remember times past.
If we lost this bloom, all the stories would go with it.
This fragrance is the
message we defend for our children:
The goodness of this Cambodian land,
These fields of rice, these mines, and jungles.
We have seen the evidence, in the south—
To lose the land is to lose our name.
To lose it all would be to live on earth with nothing to
recognize:
A scentless blossom, season after season: An empty wind.
–Trans. Aisha Down
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