Chamnongsri Rutnin

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Poetry



Chamnongsri Rutnin (Khunying Chamnongsri Hanchanlash),
bilingual Thai writer and poet with English high school education






Night Walk

Chirp of a dreaming bird pricks
silence of the hours that are
too young to care how the fields
bare their beauty to the sky
Unacknowledged, the night blooms
its velvet shared with the solitary walker
Dew-drenched trees stand mute, detached,
moon-silvered non-witnesses
of the traffic within where thoughts
impregnate thoughts, mirage begets mirage
emotion spawns emotions
Unacknowledged, the night blooms
mirroring the ever-shifting face of
magician Memory who, with not even
a wave of the wand,
conjures thoughts and turns them into
ghosts that haunt, or ungovernable beasts
that tear and claw behind locked doors
of human hearts, or butterflies that flit,
or airy clouds - intermittent, weightless -
that drift pass in calm sky
Invisible thoughts invisibly bound
pegged and leashed to invisible altar
of this I, these Mine
Waning, the moon pales
The night cedes to tentative sheen
of prenatal dawn
Thought-traffic thins ... ceases
boundaries evaporate, hours dissolve
Unchained to time
unbound by space
the Knowing ...
infinitely soft,
wakeful, still ...
pure in oneness
with
all things