Hai Phan Poet Free verse

Poem for Nguyen Dinh Toan

By Phan Tan Hai

You saw, you wrote, you sang—
the images of a time you kept;
your sorrow spread across the page,
its echo aching through your spring years.

Your feet walked long miles north and south,
this world offering little joy;
your sadness filled poems and stories,
your gaze deep, unending.

The homeland bitter as gall,
midnight cold on the yellow chrysanthemum porch;
your name carrying a fated sadness,
a country full of brokenness.

Ten years standing at the margins,
feeling as if you’d fallen to earth;
angels once broke their wings,
heaven wept for its lovers.

A time you bathed in words,
telling your stories to the world;
their sadness too deep to be stories,
like a voiceless monologue.

A time you sat in the marketplace,
pressing ink and paper into poetry;
heart’s blood soaking into your plays,
sad as a fading dream-colored robe.

Summer nights burning the dry fields,
you sat grieving the ashes;
was it then you stopped writing,
when Saigon fell into ruin?

Were the keys you played
a moon hiding your childhood,
a homeland made small,
where she sat curled in the fog?

You saw the green days break,
you dreamed of floating lanterns on the river,
guiding lonely souls in the night
to find their way toward dawn.

You left your voice in the sky,
this world too full of sorrow;
your eyes saw a hundred years like a dream,
the homeland vast with quiet grief.
-- California

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