Long Bac Poems

Farewell to the Poet Kinh Bac

By Phan Tan Hai

Curl your legs and kick the coffin—
it’s time for the chanting to begin.
You can’t just lie there forever,
listening to heaven and earth fall silent.

Try to hear the last lines of poetry
before you return to the realm of no-birth;
your body scattered as dust across the sky—
sentient or not, who can say.

Forty years without sleep,
eyes wide in astonishment;
the wind flips through pages of history,
cold across the sky of Kinh Bac.

Forty years pretending to be deaf,
writing Suoi Nguon in the marketplace;
words blooming on every page,
glittering with the colors of impermanence.

— Written in March 2016 to bid farewell to the poet Kinh Bac (Le Dinh Vien - Sau Du), editor of Suoi Nguon Magazine, Hue Quang Sino-Vietnamese Translation Center, who passed away on March 4, 2016 in Saigon.