If my poetry did not relieve your sufferings
And my singing did not upraise your misery
It doesn’t matter
If for once they could kindle in you a hope.

Imagine hundreds of genial spirits bearing anonymity
so that the towers of Champa could be in existence
And also imagine tens of thousands of hidden hands callous in their building
Then don’t mention your puny poems in the busy evening
Let the wind blow them to some regions of vanity.

Without arrogance, without competitiveness
Without escape from the fated failure in life
The sad poetry
Is always present whenever sufferings are present.

Time after time you promised to gather a masterwork in the next season
Day in and day out – the breath of your poems withered
Word by word they seized one another’s tails and queued up for the fated shifting
At the end of the adventure, could they make up a bundle of green pages?

Ten thousand cups of wine throughout the feast on earth
Are mine
For the whole season of youth in my wanderings
Some cups I bottomed up, some I filled over,
Some I neglected, and for some I calculated
But how little is the cup of life for poetry-making!

Abandoning the familiar ricefields and the dear hills
Setting sail for misty and unpredictable islands
The old sailor could not return with a golden harvest
We only saw, fluttering over the sail, the sunlight of tolerance.

There will spring up
The voice of poetry after the last voice of poetry
The long breath of poetry kept in check in the breast
There will spring up
The seed buried deeper than the deepest seed
After the rain of May
Whispering a green song for life.

Dry April – the green shore of green cactuses
Rainy July – the purple tagalau of the jungle in bloom
Then cold December – the plum hills in golden splendour
Our native land has three seasons,
Enough for all three seasons of adventure.

Translated by Nguyen Tien Van