Little girl

in the light blue dress

throw your ball into the air

and catch it,

catch it every time

as if your life

depended on

each little toss, your focused eyes,

your quick-stepped skip

to keep you close

to the dropping ball.

You live too near the Killing Fields

of Pol Pot’s madness.

Much too close

to let it fall.

Too near the brothels and the KTVs

where girls barely

older than you

have stopped the toss,

have lost the ball,

the skip, the step, caught up

in another killing field

without a skull-filled

stupa built

as monument to

mark the horror.

Little girl,

in the light blue dress,

it’s evening.

Toss your ball some more.

Notes:

1. Choeung Ek is the most famous of the many "killing fields" across CAmbodia where Pol Pot's murderous Khmer Rouge communist regime murdered nearly a fourth of the entire Cambodian population between 1975 and 1979.

2. KTVs refer to the Karaoke and TV Bars that serve as the place of contract for prostituted women.

3. A stupa is a Bhuddist shrine that holds important relics. The picture above is the memorial shrine at the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center just outside Phnom Penh. It holds the skulls and bone fragments of the thousands of victims discovered at this killing field.

4. About this poem: on the way to visit Choeung Ek, out my van window I saw a little girl in a light blue dress tossing a ball up and down in her dirt back yard as we drove through the narrow streets outside of Phnom Penh. I saw in that brief second all of her youthful exuberance and innocence and potential, and I shot up a prayer for her protection from the sex-exploitation culture that surrounds her growing up. For some reason I have not been able to get this little girl in the light blue dress out of my mind