Hai Phan Poet Free verse

A Poem Written in the Galang Refugee Camp

I sit at the edge of the sea,
learning English again—word by word,
a language I once studied in my growing years,
a childhood of remembering and forgetting,
reading once more the questions of roads and names.
 
I practice the tongue of another land—
chair, table—simple things.
Do you hear my voice trembling like tears,
each word dissolving into Galang’s waves?
If only my hair and beard would stop growing,
so I could forever mistake U and S
for Vi?t and Nam.
 
This side is the sea,
the far shore is home.
Have you ever heard,
within the vast echo of storms and rain,
my call of longing for you—
sent with the rain from this distant island,
falling over Sài Gòn of our childhood years?
I still read your letters wrong—
ch? ai, ch? ti tangled with i and t?.
Beloved, though we only held hands once,
without even a kiss to remember,
beloved, I never dared to say
when I would return—
and so I forgot the time I ran away.
 
This side is the sea,
the far shore is home.
With the same longing, each day I wake
as if still holding schoolbooks, chanting vowels.
Still within me flows without end
the echoes of the Huong River, the Ðà River;
still within me rise the C?m Mountains, the Bà Mountains;
the forests forever green like childhood hair.
Still I remember—oh, how I remember—
the friends who told old tales of T? H?i,
dreaming one day to build a corner of sky.
With that same dream, each day I wake
feeling body and mind scatter into foreign waves,
seeing on the sand the ancient heavenly road appear,
seeing on the page a thousand forests bloom,
seeing ten directions become a rain of wordless letters.
 
---- Phan Tan Hai. Written in Indonesia, 1983

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