Landscape with Translucent Moon

Jennifer Atkinson

Palm trees, like old pilings, tip

in the sand toward the Maldive Islands still.

The moon,

a slice of green coconut, floats

in a sky streaky（有条纹的） with cloud.

Eight winters after the tsunami hit,

offshore

the coral reef is reinventing itself

by fits and starts, by hook and foot

and reef-wasn't-built-in-a-day

steady calm.

Patience comes easy to gastropods（腹足类）.

The after-war

news is of atrocity（暴行）, in this like

before-, during, after-

war news everywhere: rape, torture, mass graves,

the usual list, human power

reasserting itself

on the bodies of others.

Deep in the once

jungled, once war-riven

Tamil north, a Buddha carved in living stone

still falls smiling into death,

serene these last thousand years.

How many wars

has that peace survived?

It's said that just before he died,

the historical Buddha

sent south to Sri Lanka

a slip from the original

enlightenment（启蒙，教化） tree at Bodh Gaya.

That tree planted between the sites of tsunami and war

is now the oldest tree on earth, a living

emblem of compassion

for these last two thousand years.

It's guarded night and day at gunpoint.