Moped passengers
Teaspoon their drivers –
Or relax waiting for death
03.07.15
.
———————————————————————————————————————
Copyright by Minh Tan on listed dated of completion.
———————————————————————————————————————
.
Notes to this poem…
Please click here for the background to this haiku collection if you want to know more about it.
Traffic in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam, is pretty scary. Never mind the crazy chaos of it all, but in most of it, people are just riding on mopeds like high speed bicycles, with very little protection from anything. Amid it all is a hugely wide range of how passengers ride, not requiring hands on the handle bars, obviously. Some women sit sideways, legs cross, like waiting on a bench, not even holding on to the driver! Kids just sit or even stand in front of the driver! Others just sit and relax, read, you name it and they’re pretty much doing it. On the other end, there are some who hug the driver to hold on for dear life. The way the seats are configured, the image of spooning came to mind to describe how these driver and passenger combinations were set against each other. Since it wasn’t technically an exact spooning, I used the verb “teaspoon” instead. That’s to mean a little spoon, which is what a teaspoon is. 🙂
Please click here to see all the haiku in this collection about Viet Nam.
Minh Tan's Old Poetry 
Leave a Reply