Poetry Days: Chartreuse

Photos found on the internet; the poem is by me, written a long time agoI remember hanging my head out the window of our white VW bus
into the lush, languid air of the northern Malay peninsula,
hurtling up the road toward family vacation on Phuket Island.
Idly I'd play with the rear view mirror, tilting it one way, then the other,
paddies of young green rice flashing past.
"That's my favorite color," I told my mom. "Young rice.
Is there a name for that in English?"
"Chartreuse," she said.
Years later I learn that Chartreuse is French.
A good French word to use because English hasn't a word
for the color of young green rice, glowing in the setting sun,
in paddies punctuated by occasional clumps of skinny-trunk betel nut palms.

I remember hanging my head out the window of our white VW bus,
thinking about Life at a very young age.
(That's when I do it--thinking about Life. Always on long trips,
craning my neck for quick glances at the sky.)
I wondered what my future would hold,
whom I'd marry, what I would name my kids.
I dreamed to be a mission doctor among those rice paddies,
delivering berry-brown babies, treating black-button-eyed children.
Someday someone would write a book about me.
I remember hanging my head out the window of our white VW bus,
all tangle-haired, singing into the wind, my mouth full of breeze,
belting out a dry-tongued song into the wind over the rice paddies,
no one hearing but my family.

Chartreuse: cross-country trips, songs into the wind, thoughts of Life,
hair blown straight back from my forehead, the grumble of the VW motor,
and the neon growing green of young rice.
Only a French word could utter all that
in 2 syllables.