A Peaceful Madman
As he walks on the road
he stares with an ageless face
and unweathered body
Two eyes open two empty rooms
For a thousand steps he walks the same way
forgetting each step as he takes it
losing it behind him
He doesn’t know where to take his next step
He walks and counts his steps on his fingers
counting to only one
In childhood we followed him laughing
As we grew
the sight of his shadow would interrupt our fun
but encouraged us in despair
Then he became more familiar
One day I happened to see myself
Grumbling in a crowd
Hai Phong, 1960s
Untitled [Where do the stairs lead us up to]
Where do the stairs lead us up to?
The bim is purple; part of the brick wall
shows through the stucco.
Where do the stairs lead us up to?
The coffee’s smoke and a run-down shop.
The house fell down long ago,
leaving only its stairs,
regretting the footsteps that had stepped up
and up.
Going up to catch trails of white smoke.
Going up to catch flocks of wild birds,
catching bewitchment, catching dizziness,
catching the rustling sound of the city’s life.
The house fell down long ago,
leaving only its stairs.
Where do the stairs lead us up to?
The foggy sky has no wings in flight.
The stairs suddenly come to a stop; the only way is back.
From the center of the street, a lonely kid is looking up.
Bim is a Vietnamese flower.
When I’m 23
23 years old
I don’t want anything explained to me
because I’m unreasonable about real life
The world of adults is like a honey jar
It seduces me
although I lack the ability
to love and deal with it
23
So many things are broken up
A huge world surrounds me
at the center of the crash zone
23
I dream of being a mother
but don’t want to give up my fate for my kid
and don’t know how to choose
a father for him
23
I love to use strong, active verbs
and adjectives that can hang up my feet by themselves
but I can’t understand
what’s strong enough to hang upside down by
If You Know How to Love Me
Fireflies lie flat on a field
Their lives are buried in festivals
but now I just want to ask you
if you know how to love me...
You are the only one who believes in perfect loving
It’s so simple why I chose you
You don’t have anything that’s costly
including yesterday’s pensiveness in late blinking
Now you’re my prisoner
You think you know your life,
but not who makes you boil
in this moment I give you
You don’t have to know much about me,
only what a wolf must know when its prey
suddenly cries
kissing it to the soft moment of death
when it shivers
If you know how to love me
perhaps we should create something
before, closing our eyes forever,
death has to kiss our lips
To Suddenly Remember
like someone beating a drum, the rain dropped
on my waterproof army poncho
which was torn and much needed mending
my friends were like forest trees, day by day getting fewer
the war cut them down
like an electric trimmer
but now they’re all at peace
I remember also that evening, as a child,
the sweetness of the banana in my mother’s hand,
even sweeter when she carried me on her back!
the road over the dike echoed the soul of the river
dark brown sails and bamboo shadows floating slowly
a bridge where an older man got tired
and lay down to rest but not sleep
the room where he keeps only the barest necessities
the ripe smell of bananas
some old chairs
and a small ancient teapot
the aged sunlight
an evening of summer rain
and the bomb’s echo from the Duong bridge that
sounded like rolling thunder
my parents lived there in a home
a ten-square-meter country
but because of our greater home
my parents didn’t prevent me
from going into battle
not for a brave death or a rainbow
I’m the hand on a compass
that only turns toward our room
where everything is old
A Soldier Speaks of His Generation
The day we’re leaving,
the doors of the passenger train openly wide.
There’s no longer a reason for secrets.
The soldiers young as bamboo shoots
playfully stick their heads from the windows.
The soldiers young as bamboo shoots,
with army uniforms too large for them,
crowd together like tree leaves on the stairs of the cars.
The train whistles too loudly
And too long, as if broken,
like the voice of a teen who nearly has his man’s voice now.
In our generation,
that train whistle is a declaration.
The generation in which each day is a battle,
its mission heavier than the barrel of mortar 82
that we carry on our shoulders.
The generation that never sleeps,
that goes half naked and patiently digs trenches,
that is naked and calm in its thinking,
that goes on its way as our past has gone,
by ways various and new.
There are forest trees on which names are quickly engraved.
The canteens are engraved with the letters “N” and “T.”
Each backpack contains a uniform,
some dried fish sauce, and a small lump of steamed rice.
The camp’s wood stoves flame on the stone bank of a creek,
above which hang tall cans of sour soup
made from Giang leaves and shrimp sauce.
What we have,
we share,
share on the ground
completely.
To enemies, we spend all we have in battle.
To friends, we give until all we have is gone.
If you see that our skins are black from the sun;
our misshapen bodies seem older than they are,
and you can count the calluses on our hands
along with the war medals—yet nothing quite describes us.
Oh, the clearing in Dau forest with its dry, curved leaves!
Every footstep crackles like a human voice.
In the night as we march,
several fires suddenly flare on the trail,
our generation with fire in our hearts
to light the way to our goal.
One night when rain lashes on all four sides,
We’re in Thap Muoi with no tree to hide us.
As the swamp floods, we have to push our
boats against the rising tide.
The horizon lies behind whoever drags himself ahead,
Silhouetted by the flash of lightning.
Our generation has never slept, walks every night in the flood.
Mud covers us thickly from head to foot.
So our voices are those of cowboys,
and our gazes are sharp as a thorn,
because the fire that can burn in a bog is the true fire.
When it flames up,
it burns with all of its strength.
What do you want to tell me in the hazy night, Quoc,
as you sing passionately the whole flood season?
The Dien Dien flower raises its hot yellow petals
like the face of a hand that sunlight lands and stays on.
Our country comes from our hearts, simply,
Like this Thap Muoi that doesn’t need making up
and is completely silent.
Stronger than any falling in love, this love goes directly
to any person
who doesn’t care about the limits of language.
Unexpectedly, I meet my close friend again.
We both lie down on a My Long trail,
on an army coat under the dark sky,
where just this evening a B-52 harrowed the
earth three times,
where for several years the bomb craters are uncountable,
where I suddenly speak a simple dream:
“When peace truly comes,
I will go to trail number four, spread out a coat and lie down
completely satisfied.”
My friend gazes
at a star rising from a water-filled crater.
His eyes look so strange; I see
they contain both the star and the crater...
A vortex spins on the roof of an ancient forest.
The wind whistles a long time inside the empty shells of trees.
The bats flicker in and out of sight.
A flattened space in the cane grass smolders.
We have passed the limits of the dry season,
passed the rainy season, the long limits of the rainy season
when every night our soaked hammocks hang on Tram poles.
Our boats move across the river under
the faint flares of the American army.
Sometimes, in awe of the skyline filled with red
clouds at evening,
we forget we are older than our real ages.
Our feet walk in rubber sandals across a hundred mountains,
but our shadows never walk ahead of our futures.
The battles of the past come again in memory.
Rockets exploded in air in a mass of smoke.
Our hearts beat nervously in our very first fight.
Our army-issue canteens smelled as they burned
on the roofs of the trenches.
And the garbage cans lay strewn all around.
In the silence and deafness between two bombings,
a hen’s voice suddenly called
from a small, ruined canal.
Our generation has never lived on memory
so we never rely on the past’s radiance.
Our souls are fresh as Chuong wind,
our sky the natural blue of a sunlit day.
The transport boats sail the crowded Bang Lang canal.
That evening rockets attacked,
bending down the Binh Bat trees.
Sunset covers both banks like blood.
The canal is white from the flow of toxic gases.
Suddenly I see my face on the water’s surface,
among those poisonous mists,
on which floats the Binh Bat fruit,
on which floats our breaking country,
and I see
also floating the faces of many people,
some of them friends and some I have never seen.
They are so very young
as they flicker along on the stream
into a faraway meadow
on an endless evening.
They’re the people who came first
twenty years ago as one generation
and also the ones who will come later,
twenty years from today.
That evening
on the small canal
artillery attacks and flowing water.
How clearly you can see
the faces of
our generation!
1973
This poem was very controversial in Vietnam after it was published in Hanoi’s largest literary review, Van Nghe, and was prohibited to the public by the government until 1988, when Vietnam reconstructed its economy and politics.
Giang is a wild vegetable, sour to the taste that North Vietnamese soldiers used in soup.
Dau is a very common tree in the forests of Southwest Vietnam.
Thap Muoi is a swamp where one of the largest North Vietnamese army camps was located.
Quoc is a nocturnal bird that sings “quoc, quoc, quoc,” which also means “country.”
Dien Dien is the name of a wild flower.
My Long and Binh Bat are names of trees
common in Thap Muoi swamp.
Chuong is a kind of Southwest wind.