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.
It was June, on the French side of St. Maarten, our table
on the second-floor terrace overlooking the quiet street
below, across from the nearly empty beach. The sun had
spread across the horizon as we sipped our wine; and the
restaurant belonged to us, the season over months ago.
I don’t remember how we ended up in this small
restaurant on a nondescript corner street on an island
with a split personality. We were indifferent tourists who
didn’t care when a sudden wayward afternoon shower
jolted the heat of the equatorial sun.
The twilight arrived before our first dish, as we listened
to the hysterical sound of the birds hiding in the nearby
trees, both of us laughing at their crazed noise; the bottle
of red wine helping. An eloquent moment captured like a
still life painting in the colors of our shared memories.
We were in Paris again. Dinner in the student quarter in the
shadow of Notre Dame, except we didn’t have to speak
French in Je Vois La Vien en Rose. That June week we shared
on St. Maarten, when the days were never long enough
and the nights far too short.
kill me please i wanna die cut
my wrist and slowly die slice
my throat just one time put a bullet
in my eye cut a vien so ill cry
just to see you one last time
i love you forever mom
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