Hai Phan Poet Free verse

Mother Lifts Her Thin, High Hands

By Phan Tan Hai

Mother walks to the ends of heaven and earth,
her two hands raised—thin, trembling;
her children not yet home this twelfth month,
her tears swelling into a tidal sea.

Mother wakes before the rooster cries,
waiting through many rounds of summer sun.
The Noble Truth of Suffering is what is seen;
the Noble Truth of Suffering is what is heard.

She hears a cry across the sky,
remembers her children lost like vanished birds;
the long miles ache with their hardship,
the distant sea brims with her tears.

Mother runs through rising winds,
thinking she hears her children call from the ferry shore.
The Noble Truth of Suffering is what is remembered;
the Noble Truth of Suffering is what is longed for.

Mother sings verses of pain,
watching her children scattered to ten directions;
the wind stirs with the early rain,
and she imagines them rafting across the river.

She hears death’s thunderous roar:
when this arises, that arises;
when this ceases, that ceases—
and she weeps, calling upon the spirits.

Mother sits remembering her children, singing;
standing, sitting, she walks inside a dream;
her children turn into cranes,
wandering far from Mother Au Co.

She cries for the storming rains,
praying the new year will come quickly;
with compassion she prays the rain will quench all fires,
that love will open the ancestral festival.

Mother steps into the village and dances,
invoking the Hung Kings of a thousand years;
bronze drums roar across ten directions,
as she lifts her face toward the parted seas.

Mother hides her spring of tears,
her two hands raised—thin, trembling;
her children return as H?ng birds, L?c birds,
while her hair has faded in the evening sun.

Echoing her chant like a mantra,
my body becomes the rushing rain,
Mother becomes the drifting clouds—
the far shore silent, wordless, still.
 
--- Dedicated to the poet Nguyen Quoc Thai, inspired by his poem "Returning Home to Wish Mother a Long Life".

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