Crossing the Mekong Ferry,
Reading the New Yorker
August, 1968
Under the drilling sun, puttering past mud-tide mangrove swamps,
the glossy cover struck my eye with its bursting yellow blossoms
and grapevine leaves—nasturtiums or pumpkin flowers?—like those
twining in tangles by our cottage back in Pennsylvania.
Inside, another article by Thomas Whiteside.
2,4, 5-T, teratogenicity in births. South Vietnam
1/7th defoliated. Residue in rivers, rice, and mother’s milk.
With a scientific turn of mind
I can understand that malformations in lab mice
may not occur in children, but when, last week,
I ushered three hare-lipped, tusk-toothed toddlers
to surgeries in Saigon, I wondered: what did they drink
that I have drunk? What dioxin, picloram, or arsenic
have knitted in my cells, or in my wife now carrying
our first child. Pigs were squealing in a ferry truck.
Through the slats, I saw one lather the foam in its mouth.
This poem is excerpted from Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Press, 2026), edited by Anne Coray, J. C. Todd, and Teresa Mei Chuc.
This is the third of three poems from the anthology reprinted in Terrain.org over the third week of May 2026. As an introduction to the poems, read Teresa Mei Chuc’s “War and Its Impact on Non-Human Life.”
“Crossing on the Mekong Ferry, Reading the New Yorker” originally appeared in Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems, by John Balaban (Copper Canyon Press, 1997).
John Balaban is the author of 13 books of poetry and prose, including four volumes which together have won the Academy of American Poets Lamont Prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2003, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, he was a judge for the National Book Awards. His book of poetry, Empires, was published in 2019. His collected poems, essays, and translations, Passing Through a Gate, came out from Copper Canyon Press in May 2024. In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, he is a translator of Vietnamese poetry, and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. In 1999, with two Vietnamese friends, he founded the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation. In 2008, he was awarded a medal from the Ministry of Culture of Vietnam for his translations of poetry and his leadership in the restoration of the ancient text collection at the National Library. Balaban is Professor Emeritus of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
Header photo by Nakornthai, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of John Balaban by William Seraile.
