Poetry Feature:
'Only the Dead': Vietnam
Midnight
Those who absorbed it.
.~.
| Half my sorrow is leaving, half my joy has just arrived. |
.~.
~ . ~ . ~
Nguyen Quoc Chanh
A World of Sand
Revolving Stage (III)
Linh Dinh
All International Pleasures Will Be Brought to You Through Our Aegis
Nguyen Quang Thieu
Beauty
Dinner
On the Highway
The Ben Hai/Hien Luong: A Mason-Dixon River in a Civil War
(excerpts from various authors)
Pronounced: "ded"
(an antiphon composed of poems by
Thuong Vuong-Riddick and Mark Kessinger)
~ . ~ . ~
Nguyen Quoc Chanh
A World of Sand
The day lies face down on top of night, he and things
Lie in voluptuousness. Time is many bats
Cutting the night's darkness into irregular bits, each bit
A live rhythm to splash into the crowd
And from this crowd, another empty space
Slams down the door. The room
Swells and flexes. Shuddering and leaving a runway, opening up the body
Two sympathetic systems mix heat through the night. On the day
The hedge collapses, he dreams and is afraid of age, although
The shadow flows and suddenly, homogenizes
All shapes. He and blocks of monochromatic
Colors cover the wall, play the morning game
Of an imagination avoiding shapes, ejecting each thing from its spoken name
A figure is dropped into a bottomless sensation... Have intercourse
With savages. With the sheep Dolly, a mountain peak capable
Of reproducing, rides each other, sculpts symbols
Of debauchery, unformed, unstamped, and
Manifesting predictions of balance
In a book of fortunes. As a prediction of imbalance, he shows
A means to survive by ejecting the sadness of teeth and hair,
The sadness of sap oozing. As a stutterer
In the world criss-crossed with directives, and in a wretched
Coincidence, he became lost and found himself in a deluge.
(The seasons supplant each other, until the season of
Disintegration.) A sun ray crosses through, he hears
Reverberating in the blood. He longs to wraps his arms
Around the neck of a cow and to frolic with children. He carries
A fresh fear, the fear of a woman imprisoned
Inside a birthmark finished with menstruation, turning back
To a lost stretch of the road, counting the fallen eggs on top of the vault
Of the thirtieth. A night of the alphabet, of intonations,
Of an hour flowering, of white enthusiasm. And the breasts
Of the earth are always shifting into puberty, so the well-worn roads
Will grow lush, and the body will retreat into the swamp reeds, and the
memory
Will detach itself from all things. Drop a thought into the water
To reach a world of sand...
(Transl.: Linh Dinh)
. ~ .
I need the shore where impoverished grains of sand lie side by side.
-- Nguyen Quang Thieu ("Between Night and Morning")
. ~ .
Revolving Stage (III)
With the eyes closed every sound is white. Last night's dream hasn't escaped
from the smell of the dirty shoe. In the valley a herder raises his
artificial leg to jab into the past.
War of the genitals is replaced by a synthesized elastic. Music without
windows. On the festival of death, women are inflated by bombs into enormous
wombs, the sources of violent bloodlines.
A land of museums holds the deformed and the strangely alive. The crawling
reptilian strength of a damp culture. And the homosexuals like to tattoo
onto the regenerative organs images of bugs and venomous creatures.
Nightly news of a low pressure system, and flood, overflow the TV stations.
A belief from the river's source shatter dikes packed with pasty earth lumpy
inside many heads nodding off to sleep. The ancestors are underwater. Faith
and filial piety wait for emergency food. The ghosts are demanding Miliket
instant noodles. The kinds of death not found in dictionaries, and life
shits and pisses on concepts.
(Transl.: Linh Dinh)
. ~ .
Humanity drinks from a humble jug
And sings eternal love-songs.
-- Nguyen Quang Thieu ("Between Night and Morning")
. ~ .
~ . ~
Linh Dinh
All International Pleasures Will Be
Brought to You Through Our Aegis
The in crowd are lounging on beach chairs in front of empty skyscrapers.
Children the color of dirt are lying on flesh-colored ground.
A drunk is threatening to slam a soda bottle against his own face,
Unless you buy last week's lottery tickets from him.
The bridge snorts, clears its throat, spits out 10,000 accidents.
Luxuriating on a vinyl couch, the coed coos:
"I'll recycle my life by getting hitched to a fat one from overseas.
Being innocent, I have nothing more to say..."
A legless man, walking on two stools, is demanding to be sent to paradise.
~ . ~
Nguyen Quang Thieu
Beauty
On a rough road
Cold winds howl
An ox raises its head
To pull a heavy cart
A man without shoes
Stoops to push the cart
And on the cart
On a pile of stones
A woman sits in silence.
A scarf covers her head
And wraps her beautiful face.
The cold winds rage
From four directions
The ox curses the long road
The man curses the slow ox
And the woman wraps the scarf again
To cover part of her face.
(Prior publ. Illuminations and Tho.
Transl.: the author and Martha Collins)
Dinner
My children come first
To the tray of food.
Then my mother
And father. Then me.
Next come the yellow dog
And the striped cat
And the summer mosquitoes.
Then the wind from the fields
And the moon from the parched sky.
Last comes a neighbor child
Who sits by my side
While the yellow dog growls.
I'm not hungry for what's
On the tray. My dinner's laid out
With the lightning on the horizon.
(Prior publ. Luna and Tho.
Transl.: the author and Martha Collins.)
On the Highway
Women carrying bamboo shrimp pots
Walk in a line on the side of the highway,
Dressed in brown and black.
Their hands, their feet, and their eyes show,
But they are brown and black too.
The pots on their shoulders are crescent moons pulled from mud,
The baskets at their hips are shaved heads that sway as they march.
Their shadows spill onto the highway in black puddles.
They walk like defeated soldiers, in silence;
The pot handles bend down, like empty rifles.
Their torn clothes, smelling of dried mud,
Are flags from village festivals that have ended.
Fish scales cling to their clothes and glitter like medals.
They expect no welcome, await no acclamation.
Like clouds floating heavy before a storm,
The women walk in a line on the side of the highway.
Where do they come from and where will they go,
Spreading the smell of crabs and snails around them?
~ . ~ . ~
The Ben Hai/Hien Luong: A Mason-Dixon River in A Civil War
.~.
I’ve divided myself in two parts, but both are still full.
-- Nguygen Quang Thieu ("Between Night and Morning")
.~.
I cannot accept this war.
I never could, I never will.
I must say this a thousand times before I am killed.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh
(from "Condemnation")*
~ . ~
To you I'll give a coil of wire, barbed wire,
the climbing vine of all this modern age--
[ . . . ]
To you I'll give the gift of twenty years
or seven thousand nights of cannon fire.
For seven thousand nights it's sung to you--
have you dozed off or are you still awake?
-- Tran Da Tu
(from "Gifts as Tokens of Love")
~ . ~
And our hands are dry and burnt,
Yet bamboo spears shall break the steel blades.
-- Thai Nguyen
(from "Let Us Stand Up" )
~ . ~
I guard my post this evening
At the end of Ben Hai Bridge.
The steady blue current below
Is like a blood vein joining North to South.
--Lieutenant Nguyen van Nghia
(from "I Stand Here")
~ .
I stand here at the demarcation line
Looking South, remembering North.
I am divided like the land.
-- Lieutenant Nguyen van Nghia
(from "From My Heart of Hearts")
~ . ~
Only a river to cross, yet how far it is!
Who severs South from North,
wives from husbands?
We both bathe in the same water,
But it is clear on one side,
muddy on the other.
--Nhat Hanh
(from "Lament of Ben Hai River")
~ . ~
No wider than a chopstick
a peasant girl's halter
will bridge you, two banks reflecting
her face and mine
no wider than this open palm!
Up at your source no bands divide:
down by the sea
your mouth is no wider
than a water carrier's yoke!
So wide this sadness
this indignation
whose waves break endlessly on endless shore!
[ . . . ]
O my people
and for a moment
this No Man's River
is the Perfumed River
is the Mekong
swelling and swelling . . .
--Author unknown
(from "To the River at Hien Luong Ben Hai,
between North and South")
~ . ~
She said
Look upon me with your large dark curious eyes
And remember . . .
Only now I can't remember and I can't understand
Why she left me in a basket on the steps of a Saigon orphanage.
I cannot fathom her actual pain, only the residual pain,
Her only legacy to me, the loss impaling my soul.
--R.A. Streitmatter/Tran Trong Dat
(from "Bui Doi 2")
~ . ~
We all wanted to bring our mothers.
[ . . . ]
I left my mother in our house on the street
that had been named General de Gaulle,
then Cong Ly, or Justice Street,
and then Cach Mang, Revolution Street.
I left my money on the outside porch
and never saw her again.
--Tran Thi Nga
(from "Packing")
* River- and mother-related excerpts from From Both Sides Now (Phillip Mahony, Ed., Scribners Poetry, 1998)
.~.
Night is a poem, day is a piece of bread;
Both torment me all the time.
-- Nguygen Quang Thieu ("Between Night and Morning")
.~.
Nguygen Quang Thieu was born in 1957 in Ha Tay, and now lives in Hanoi. A leading figure in the post-1975 generation of writers, he is a poet, fiction writer, translator and editor of the influential Van Nghe journal. He received Vietnam’s national award for poetry in 1993 for his collection, The Insomnia Of The Fire. The rest of "Between Night and Morning" and other examples of his work appear in Tho and/or in that magazine's online version at www.vietnamesepoetry.com.
~ . ~ . ~
Pronounced: "ded"
(an antiphon composed of poems by
Thuong Vuong-Riddick and Mark Kessinger)
Dark or blue, all beloved, all beautiful.
Numberless eyes have seen this day.
They sleep in the grave,
and the sun still rises.
We had every kind of death in Nam,
fast dead, near dead,
Dead in Diên Biên Phu fuckin dead,
point blank dead,
Dead in Langson, dead in Mong Cai
unconfirmed dead
Dead in Haïphong, dead in Phat Diêm
missing presumed dead
Dead in Vinh, dead in Hatinh
dead head
Dead in Dalat, dead in Nha-Tranh
next to dead
dead ends,
after a while
live with it
I have wanted to call your name
part of the dead you live among.
the human sound.
(Both poems reprinted from From Both Sides Now (Phillip Mahony, Ed., Scribner Poetry, 1998). Kessinger'spoem is entitled "Dead." Vuong-Riddick's poem, "My Beloved is Dead in Vietnam," appears with the Prudhomme quotation and a dedication to Trinh Cong Son, author of The Mad Woman.)