Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TREKKING THE HILLS OF NORTHERN THAILAND, by KAREN SWENSON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TREKKING THE HILLS OF NORTHERN THAILAND, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The english girl is being sick in the bushes
Last Line: That there always be other hills.
Subject(s): Thailand; Tourists; Travel; Journeys; Trips


The English girl is being sick in the bushes,
helped by the Frenchman.
The American couple are identifying wildflowers.
Our guide is dozing off last night's twenty pipes.

Two pigs squeal in their pen
and the only inhabitant of this abandoned village
comes singing through his nose with a pail full
of corn cobs followed by two blue-eyed kittens.

The jungle's green silence
reoccupies paths where human voices
called each other's names.

Over tattered palm-frond roofs,
over low crests of hills that subside
to the plain's green patchwork of paddies,
sitting on a tree stump, I look out to hills
that answer like an echo these I sit among

and, I suppose, that is all I really want,
the only form of E = mc2 I understand -
file after ragged file of silhouettes,
misty recessions into endless distance -
that there always be other hills.





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