Summer Sounds...

(Baonghean) - May is a month when nature has many colors and flavors. Royal poinciana flowers are bright in the schoolyard, purple lagerstroemia flowers are on the sidewalks. Village ponds emit the sweet scent of lotus flowers and many fruits seek May, seek summer to ripen. Fruits cling to fruits, flowers bloom in flowers, fragrance spreads in fragrance. A ripe summer awakens in people's hearts...

Summer ripens when the rice fields are in harvest season, the golden rice fields are fragrant with the wind, heavy with curled rice stalks. Summer ripens when the kitchen smoke smells of new rice. The smoke is so strange. There is something fragile, but it spreads and lifts the whole person up. Fragrant smoke or ripe smoke. The lingering smoke and the emotions dry up the feelings, the memories through the misty fields of childhood to "Now the nose is still stinging" (poem by Bang Viet).

And the sun, the sun is like an invisible heat energy that activates the full bloom of flowers from color to fragrance, from fragrance to fruit like a blessing of birth, full, plump and ripe. I suddenly remember the haunting verse of poet Nguyen Khoa Diem when he suddenly realized that we grow up: "the squashes and gourds grow down" turning their hearts to the earth. The roots are here, the fragrance and color also start from there.

Happy Royal Poinciana season. Photo: Quoc Dan

Many times I absentmindedly look up at the blue summer sky, the heart-stopping blue: “The sky is as blue as if it were torn out of its core - The trees are as green as if they were writhing in their own green” (poem by Thi Hoang). And suddenly I realize: “Summer ripens when the sky is still green - The ripe fruit on the tree hides a blue sky”. The sky’s skin and skin are still very rough. When summer is in full swing, when the rice is ripening abundantly, it is also the time when storms are lurking offshore.

The storm hid behind the thin white clouds, seemingly vague and suspicious. The farmers, their friends were happy with the harvest. A harvest with sweat and tears. The melon fields were filled with worries. The watermelons, like the summer sun, sometimes overripe in the anxiety of falling prices.

And fortunately, nature is truly gracious and generous, balancing the ecosystem so that it is never excessive. Giving and receiving, gaining and losing, that is also the cycle of creation like the law of sedimentation of the river. And summer has ripened in the season of love, sympathy, and sharing of community gratitude.

Ripe summer is also the time when the cicadas begin to sing out mournfully. Cicadas build nests, practice their voices, and filter their sounds underground. From eggs they transform into cocoons, from cocoons they hatch into cicadas, so that the music harmonizes, the chords filter through rain and sun, sometimes rising and sometimes falling, sometimes high and low, but the “cicadas” are never sad or depressed, but strangely moved. Cicadas mature in their own sound, in the sound of summer...

WriterNguyen Ngoc Phu