Pleading that they’ll save us much hard work the motorcycle hustlers are insistent, but we prefer the pilgrims’ path: the walk
that wanders up away from these persistent pesterers buzzing the road-route helter-skelter. We want to look for birds and view the distant
vistas of the fertile Mekong Delta, hiking in the mountain’s cool fresh air above the choking Chau Doc City swelter.
There stands a massive concrete Buddha where the trail begins, outside a bright pagoda, fixing the suburb with His doting stare.
Dubious devotees have dumped a load of garbage at the feet of this smug fellow - plastic food trays, empty cans of soda -
not what you’d expect from those that follow a thoughtful faith, but what is more upsetting’s the puzzling corpses of a dozen swallows
mixed in with the muck, like black confetti. We scale the holy mountain tramping over plastic bags entangled like spaghetti,
but hear no tell-tale trill nor flutter, ever. The hillside’s shorn of trees, and looking up we note no flick of wing nor flash of feather
until we gain the temple at the top. It’s here - the peaceful tinging bells competing with many tourists’ babblings; with the pops
and raspberrys of scooter engines beating up the metalled road, their riders vying to take us down again - we catch a tweeting:
pitiful tears of captive swallows crying, compressed in crates. Although to us it’s plain that some of them are dead, the others dying,
their captors smile, oblivious to the pain of what they sell for “merit of release”, which yield to stress if they’re not caught again. ...smug and concrete smiles, quite at ease with all the hollow rituals of past ages, doting down on rice fields with no trees and cities where a public disengages with gifts from Heaven, stifled in their cages.