The library of Cabramatta speaks at four a.m.,
speaks to the exhaustion of red-lantern lit streets,
speaks to calm the ghosts of ten-thousand children
who have lost their voice in twice-overdue Dr. Seuss books,
speaks with a Siren voice, in a dead language,
in a whisper that slices through the heart
of a dozen Aussie hobos dozing against its bricks,
speaks to the morning because no one listens.

It spoke
to me when I sat in the children's section,
watching a Vietnamese woman watch her only daughter.
The daughter, with her sweatshirt blue school uniform,
wrinkled cotton sun-hat, and banana-blue backpack,
devoured picture books as her mother had freedom.
The mother consumed her daughter's smile and strange tongue
as if they would redeem thirty dead years of Nhà Trang.
The library asked me why I never come at four a.m.,
when it needs another voice, when it needs memory.

I left in search of a book on Chinese chess.
I have been in love with Chinese chess since
I saw a congregation of middle-aged,
strand-bearded Chinese men squatting over
the lost brown shades of Cabramatta's tiled plazas.
They shifted those sawdust wooden pieces
across red ink paper boards
with the certainty of theatre majors
reciting Shakespeare to strange women.
I saw Shakespeare for the first time
in their chessboard.

I found the book behind a 25 year old student from Hanoi.
He knelt under a table with his blue Bic pen.
The scroll beneath him spewed
Chinese characters a meter high
and tore them down again, towards reluctant
random scribbles. The library's voice
vibrated through burgundy paint chip walls,
The student broke his oblivion, sighed,
handed me the book,
and returned his swollen eyes
to a blank sheet of English paper.

I turned the corner and arrived at the poetry section,
where specters of Chinese chess superstars floated
over ivory boards and pieces from Canton.
As I approached, they recited Li Bai in an accent I've never heard,
and faded into the sea-washed outline
of a bearded poet, who was either a future self,
or the student from Hanoi.
The voice died.
The poet looked to me, pale, close to death,
and begged,
"I have been silent for six years.
Is it time?"