Skin and bones
Sad eyes and smokes of tobacco
Blank sheets of paper and white nights
Swim across the hidden current of water.

You
Come and go
The vacant chair is left.

With not even a backward look
The black syllables wear the faces of sea owls
And close the door against a handshake.

Beside and around
Cast over a narrow glance
To attempt a funeral pyre of our souls
Even in the past tense.

The monsoon is in fury
And bends down the green grasses impatient to raised their heads.

Before the dazzling and fraudulent pinch of light
We oppose / chime in / or collude?
We are offenders / or judges?
Or, are we on the wayside?
Who could understand!?

In the dialogue rejected
A dawn is blocked
At the feast table piled up to the sky
We are the empty bottles thrown into a corner
In the disordered rhythms of the ancient dance
Nobody could cling to the hair of one’s destiny.

You
Leaning on silence
Stand.

Go
Nobody could console emptiness.

Only refusal supports your hope.

The mother forgets her tears
The wife forgets her complaints
The child forgets weeping
The friend forgets the last cup of wine.

In the crackling fire of paddy stubbles
Dazzled by blind glory
We
extinguish the wind in our breasts.

The dark night flexes both its arms’s muscles
In domination.

You
Carrying the breath of the monsoon
Go away.

Even boredom disdains to remain.

Before the poor, overbearing clouds
Before the puny pinches of light both lamenting and arrogant
Toward the pale current of water.
You
tending the seed of sunlight with both hands
Are waiting.

The peasant
Slowly cuts each furrow in the soil
And sees the opening of the night.

Being nowhere and never understood
Lonely as the abyss of solitude
You flap the wings
Toward the monsoon.

On the other side of silence.
The sound of gliding feet
The sneezing of prehistoric insects
The breath-holding of hermits
The seed-sowing of arms into the invisible
The jingling of baked bricks in old dynasties
The evaporation of the bog
The rubbing on paper of poems not yet written
The roaring of dead sea
Fire breaks into the walls of night
The 300-year-old cauldron suddenly pierces space with its cry
And weeps at the birth of a voice.

The unexpected joy resounds in the festival
The last thing that could save us:
SINGING.

Translated by Nguyễn Tiến Văn.