A child filled with love and life
Leaves her lucky home
With family to protect her
She doesn’t feel alone
To return in three nights, a lie
They walk for seven days
Meeting with more family for months
Then they must go away

A child full of love and pain
Finds a place that isn’t home
Rationed food and staring eyes
Yet she doesn’t feel alone
Brothers, sisters, mother, father
All must move again
More rationed food and staring eyes
With deeper hunger pains

A child full of love and hunger
Wanting her red dress
Her old life, her old food
Just wanting to rest
Three siblings sent to labor camps
Her sister dies; a bother
They came one day, a stuck wagon
First, they killed her father

A child full of hate and hunger
Crying for her pa
A brother, now the man, steals corn
For his sisters and ma
Caught, beaten, released to return
Ma’s poor little monkey
A loss of needed nutrition
A loss of a way to be

A child full of hate and anger
Again to leave her home
Splits with brother, stays with sister
Doesn’t want to be alone
A few months later, a child soldier
Feels she must be strong
It’s survival of the fittest
She isn’t necessarily wrong


A child full of hate and strength
Eighty girls share her home
Propaganda streaming every night
She’s finally alone
Reunited with her family
Six months before
Next, they killed her sister and ma
Will there be more?

A child full of hate and fear
Attacked by the Youns
Both sides spilling blood
Who are the evil ones?
She finds her sister and brother
From the violence and fear
They live with foster families, two
Keeping each other near

A child full of hate and love
Found by two more brothers
An execution of a Khmer soldier
Done by two mothers
Seeing aunts, uncles and cousins
Once again to smile
Eldest brother leaves and returns
Over miles and miles

A child full of love and hate
Moves again from home
With eldest brother to Vietnam
She is not alone
She stays with her eldest brother
And his loving wife
They sail to a Thailand refugee camp
In hopes of a new life

A child full of love and hope
Four months to call the camp her home
Finally sponsored to Vermont
Never again to be alone
Years pass, she writes her story
Everyone’s story, it seems
To bring a closing to the horror
And silence her memories