Polchate Kraprayoon
Two Poems
In the Deep South, a Judge Shoots Himself
October 2019, Yala, Thailand
Five boys and their families,
charged with secret dealings and conspiracy.
Five flies caught in Law’s knotted lattice,
wrapped in brittle spider-fabric,
they await their verdict.
At three o’clock, words fall from the judge’s mouth
like monsoon rain—
seeping through the courtroom floor
down to the crowned roots and ruddy clay
beneath their feet.
An hour in, the room is halfway drowned,
steeped through with the muck of an old grudge,
the faint smell of burning palm,
the far-off sound of armored cars
—that old, old lullaby
rocked our ragged land to sleep
โยกเยกเอย น้ำท่วมเมฆ [yok-yayk-oei nam-tuam-mayk
กระต่ายลอยคอ หมาหางงอ kratai-loikaw ma-hawng-ngaw
กอดคอโยกเยก gawt-kaw-yok-yayk]
“I have been ordered to send
these men to death,”
he said,
“Here, the law flirts with arms,
it chases gold and grinds the poor to dust.”
“I can’t continue to live like this,
therefore, I must acquit.”
He turns and bows to the King’s portrait,
he buries the pistol’s nose
between his ribs
and squeezes.
All they hear is the bullet’s breath,
its soft burst muffled by his cloth robe.
That moment sunk into the bellied South
—blood-brimmed, soft,
and bottomless—
the iron nourishing
the ruptured earth,
it drips into the seeds and stirs
the soil’s hope and hunger.
It’ll be time for harvest soon.
Red Drum
For Porlajee ‘Billy’ Rakchongcharoen
What’s left of you?
A blackened oil drum,
its shattered lid, flecked charcoal,
a pair of steel rods
and shrunken bone — all burnt.
Your drum is red as rust
or bloodwood
under the soot-soaked bruises
or ash-lacquer
cladding its thick body.
Five years, four months gone
before they fished you out
Kaeng Krachan’s wet maw,
which swallowed then spit-blasted
your mottled caul.
The newspaper said
it was a Seventies throwback,
two drums stacked,
halved by a steel grille.
The bottom — half-petrol and packed coal
— the top is filled with your type,
agitators, the fire-stokers
that Grandma warned me about.
She remembers what the radio said
about the Reds.
We fought fire with fire,
she said
and, oh God, we beat that war-drum hard.
They turned your home into a stove,
and cooked you into crumb
and now what's left of you?
The taste of wild honeycomb
on your shrinking tongue,
numbered bones, hungry ghosts
and the still-beating red drum.
Polchate (Jam) Kraprayoon was born and raised in Bangkok and works for an intergovernmental organization in Tokyo. He received a Master’s from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor's at the LSE. His work has been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry and Harbor Review and is forthcoming in Portland Review.