Lucinda Sabino

The Rice Candy Factory

We travelled through stubbled fields, carried
by the slow flow of the café-au-lait river
thick with silt, to stand in the dusty yard.

Everyone else is working, moving. The families
of the rice candy factory, air thick with charcoal smoke,
stir, cut, wrap, while a small girl toddles from workspace
to workspace, and a baby naps under a handwritten sign,
“no photo baby.”

Another village and we climb into rickety
ox carts. Among the oxen and tourists, three sisters
hold trays of silver jewelry, stand close,
make eye contact, tell you they are earning
money for school. They follow us down the road,
run to keep up. Moved, my husband
hands them dollar bills out of the back of the cart.

We have had no surprises, except the wet season’s
swimming ponds, water filled craters; left by the decade
of bombs dropped by American B-52s, scattered
randomly over the countryside.

And the fact that there are as many as 500,000 land mines still
in the earth of Cambodia. Just two weeks before we arrived,
a family on a motorbike; father, mother, three children
blown to bits.

Lucinda Sabino has spent over 50 years involved in the lives of children. She is a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and spent 20 years as the owner/operator of an infant and toddler day care center. Writing about the way family and culture dovetail, she draws on her travel experiences, especially those involving the varied lives of children. She has two poetry chapbooks, We’re Coming Close and Dancing in the Intersection. Part of the Detroit area poetry community, she has taught Advanced Poetry through Springfed Arts and is an active supporter of InsideOut Literary Arts.