The Secret of Hoa Sen Read online

  to light up my love for Hà Nội.

  My own love,

  in the sound of footsteps intertwining with darkness;

  the sound of insects the voice of a thousand years;

  the sound of ancestors flowing into light;

  the sound of brooms sweeping a new autumn for only me,

  shining the stars around myself.

  Old Quarter, houses huddle, leaning into each other,

  emitting shadows,

  leading me to the streets of Bùi Xuân Phái.*

  I touch my fingerprints onto the present and past,

  and sketch a drawing of Hà Nội.

  * Bùi Xuân Phái (1920–1988) is one of the most extraordinary figures of Vietnamese modern art, famous for his paintings of Hà Nội’s Old Quarter.

  THE WHITE SKY

  I pick up my pen,

  not yet writing,

  the pages already full of the words of others.

  I close my eyes,

  not yet dreaming, night

  already smeared with the dreams of others.

  From beyond the pages, cries of suffering

  from where unfairness coolly patrols.

  I kneel under the rain,

  confess under the white sky.

  THE DESIRE OF CLOUDS

  The summer shower pours into me,

  pure rain in a chorus

  reborn from oceans, rivers, fields,

  from tears of misery and tears of happiness.

  One day the clouds open and pour into me,

  silting, singing.

  Rain vibrates like a forest, freeing itself like the sea;

  rain of no nationality,

  drumming into me the impetuous, murmured piano tones;

  the rain blankets me, the human fates

  short-lived, tottering, white only once.

  MEKONG DELTA

  In the waking, ancient songs,

  I find the Mekong Delta.

  Playing tag with the day,

  I hide in the season of điên điển flowers,

  golden, marking the season;

  the rising river misses me;

  glittering on its surface, the traditional vọng cổ songs rise.

  The sampan’s shadow rows backward into the hair of sunset.

  The girl in a white straw hat hides her white smile.

  To carry the seasons away, the sampan separates the light.

  The floating market sinks me in the fresh colors of fruit.

  The floating market sinks me in the sound of people’s laughter,

  enriching me who is stunted,

  greening me who is withered.

  I am wild, my footsteps left in strange lands,

  leaving behind my childhood in the Delta of sun and wind,

  the red dirt roads, the purple water hyacinths.

  The white bà ba blouses of the women in the Delta

  purify the sunrise.

  High on the monkey bridge, my footsteps forget their way.

  The day catches up to me;

  the day clings to me,

  lighting sun onto the swaying trees.

  HÀ NỘI

  I was not born nor raised in Hà Nội.

  Hà Nội gave birth to itself and grew up inside of me,

  a lush green tree of love,

  carved with the figure of the flag tower of Hà Nội,

  unfurling the word Motherland into my soul.

  The tree bears the Old Quarter’s body; sunlight

  oversleeps on tilting tile roofs.

  Lake of the Returned Sword, West Lake, Ngọc Khánh Lake

  pour light into me,

  migrate into me the red, white, purple, and pink

  of the flamboyant Madonna lilies,

  the purple summer bằng lăng flowers, the aromatic lotus buds

  all conspire to nomad me into the night markets of Quảng Bá

  where the straw hats of the farmers brighten the moon.

  The Red River banks curve

  as the bodies of Hà Nội girls

  whose hair is soft with the fragrance of hoa sữa flowers.

  The Citadel Gate enters the night, opening up small lanes, eerie

  with dew;

  people returning lose their way.

  Thirty-six roads lead to the Turtle Tower’s chest.

  The afternoon of falling leaves allows autumn to return.

  People carry their goods on their shoulders, their footsteps

  wearing down the dike.

  Life flows through everything, lingering in tea shops and in phở

  shops,

  so far away, so close, so exotic,

  the flowers, the leaves, and the voices of people

  as if there for only me,

  so as to become me.

  I was not born nor raised in Hà Nội.

  Hà Nội gave birth to itself, and then grew up inside of me.

  YOUR RIVER

  In memory of Nguyễn Đình Thống

  Stars without wings

  drop night’s battered tears from the sky.

  Your soul flies up; the sky cries down;

  the drops fill my eyes;

  flow, eternal river.

  The river delivers you to a sunrise

  where a grain of sand—the human soul—takes wing to fly

  above your human dream

  to mend your rags with hope.

  You had silently accepted to be a tiny green dot.

  When you are gone, the entire forest sheds its leaves.

  I sing for you the highland’s waves, softening the stone shore.

  I sing for you storks’ wings of the south.

  I sing for you the northern sunlight’s grassy fragrance

  carrying you towards your river home.

  MY FATHER

  I board the train; clouds blur my father’s hair.

  The train hooting bursts into tears.

  My father’s fragile figure, the afternoon wind

  cuts into us, chilling. Heavily

  the turn of separation churns.

  Behind me, the dry fields are uneven in the scorching sun.

  My father’s hands hardened and scarred,

  sprinkling green seasons to come on the fields.

  Under his back, stories of the seasons of rice harvests;

  the words of good work sing out with the sweat

  and hope he breaths in every day.

  It has taken me half my life,

  to understand that my father’s gaze, his smile and his silence

  are my most precious inheritance.

  I can now read his thoughts

  alive behind his simple faded shirt,

  love overflowing, choking his heart,

  the love he dedicates to me,

  that sweetens the rivers in the scorching season.

  I stand before the field that my father sowed,

  listening to green lives rise under the earth.

  MY MOTHER

  I cross the Lam River to return to my homeland

  where my mother embraces my grandmother’s tomb in the rain,

  the soil of Nghệ An so dry the rice plants cling to rocks.

  My mother chews dry corn; hungry, she tries to forget.

  I cross the sedge fields to return to Ninh Bình.

  Just after my birth, the war dropped many bombs there.

  To protect me from those storms, my mother spread her wings,

  her faded shirt fragrant with the red gạo blossoms.

  I cross the Mekong River to return to Bạc Liêu,

  the skinny shadow of my mother

  imprinted against the afternoon light,

  each drop of sweat in exchange for a seed of rice;

  yet in spite of this hardship, she always smiles.

  I cross time to return to the past.

  My mother sends me away among raindrops.

  She lights the stove fire, sits there, waiting for me.

  I begin to walk, e
ach step the distance of a vast sea.

  I cross the distance to return to Sài Gòn.

  Oh my mother, her hair is turning white.

  She is forever as she was before: gentle, loving, and kind.

  Now that I can finally see her love, time has passed away.

  I am always far away, and guilty not to be there.

  I don’t know if I can repay you, my dear mother.

  So young, you worked your life hard and were strong,

  the way you met so many storms alone.

  I overcome my shyness, to hug my mother for the first time.

  I would love to stay by her side.

  Hesitantly, my feet walk the dusty road of life.

  I hear my heart cry. A sea of a thousand strings holds me back.

  SPEAKING WITH MY CHILDREN

  For Mai Clara and Minh Johann

  I mirror myself into your eyes, and see the blue sky of salvation.

  I kneel down and believe that innocence and kindness still exist.

  Your hair parts,

  showing the way back to my childhood,

  rows and rows of corn and sweet potatoes young as your hair,

  vast rice fields fragrant as your hair.

  I am five years old again, in a hide-and-go-seek game;

  I find myself behind closed doors,

  your tiny hands

  opening the gates to paradise.

  Immense, immense the sound of your laughter and speech,

  tweeting your pouting voices.

  You are the adults, and I am the child.

  The earth reveals itself as round one moment and square the next.

  We run wildly in the field, generous with wind

  and with grasshoppers, locusts, yellow flowers, and red flowers.

  We rock each other to sleep beside the moon and stars.

  Yellow flowers, red flowers, grasshoppers, and locusts.

  The alarm clock rings in a new day with a twisted face.

  In storms of movement, people stumble into each other.

  Dusty road, smoky vehicle,

  you call me back to the blue sky of salvation.

  Washing away the dust and smoke, I am five again,

  chasing fireflies under that starry night.

  THE SEA

  Naked and white

  I dash into the white waves.

  The sea of wonder pins me down in an embrace,

  the waves above me in a tango

  that entwines me in a long kiss, as deeply as he can.

  Is it heaven here? How do I find my way home?

  Red coral, blue shoals of undulating fish,

  enchanting me until my last breath.

  Dissolving myself into the sea, I rise in my rebirth.

  MY FATHER’S HOME VILLAGE

  Among the new corn

  my father waited for his mother;

  the grass on the dike shriveled.

  The afternoon in deep sleep,

  my grandfather started the fire,

  sunlight came to rest

  on our doorstep, mướp flowers

  made the pond golden,

  dragonflies flew high, grasshoppers

  flew low, calling rain to come

  and fill the fresh, clear well.

  The war rushed in; village

  men left and few came back,

  pain engraved white on the old ones’ hair.

  My father’s childhood was filled with bombs and bullets;

  after the drought, the river flooded the village.

  My father tied his promise into a grass ring,

  and during a windy afternoon,

  he proposed marriage to my mother.

  The small road filled with laughter,

  the gạo flowers set fire to the sky.

  The leisurely dew came to weave its net on the pond.

  Upon the arrival of autumn, I cried my first tear.

  The vegetable flowers are gold,

  the hibiscus red;

  on the windy dike, my brother’s kite flew high.

  I baked sweet potatoes in hot ash;

  I ran to hide among the young green rice

  my mother had sown.

  Through hungry seasons, the village hill was steep,

  people bending their backs, patiently tending their seeds,

  their gazes haunted by cracked fields.

  My father still believed, still plowed and hoed,

  the village roads fragrant again with the scent of new cut hay.

  Storms come, destroy the gạo tree at the village gate,

  but the bamboo grove gave birth to new seasons of young plants.

  The curves of the village temple,

  the Persian lilacs’ purple,

  the sunset with low-flying stork wings.

  I hug the rice straw to sleep.

  Because I keep my homeland in my heart,

  my harvest is rich,

  all year round.

  BEING VIETNAMESE

  Hundreds of eggs from our mother, u Cơ*,

  the eggs of the universe

  that one day hatch into us.

  We are soaked with a sunrise of green lotus.

  Our mother sings us the thousand-year-old lullaby

  in Vietnamese.

  The white rice from the delta of our labors feeds us.

  Our hair flies with the free wings of storks.

  We collect rice straws to cushion our sleep,

  our journey long, our dreams still alive.

  We harvest the season of ripe sun.

  The Mekong Delta tilts its shore.

  The immense Trường Sơn range lifts up our voices.

  The Red River silkens our lives.

  We have crossed the glorious cities,

  Paris of light or ancient London.

  Our souls still drift back to our harbor

  where our mother’s lullabies sing out,

  back to the temple roof, curved like the crescent moon.

  Riverbanks silky with ancient songs,

  The fragrance of fresh rice straw along country roads

  adorns our memory.

  Old bamboo groves make us young again,

  back to the human waterfall, surging to all directions,

  flowing nonstop with the blood of Lạc Hồng.

  Whose dreams have drained the Eastern Sea dry?

  We are the people, the thousand rivers of Việt Nam.

  Through rough water and huddles we still flow back

  to the heart of our sea,

  to the golden rice fields,

  to the bamboo groves that tilt the afternoon,

  to the shore that tilts the moon.

  And all of this we call Motherland,

  a Motherland sacred with the colors of Việt Nam

  that rise to faraway shores.

  * According to legends, Vietnamese people are the children of Mother u Cơ, who is an immortal mountain fairy, and Father Lạc Long Quân, who descended from dragons. The first Vietnamese people are said to come out of the hundred eggs which Mother u Cơ gave birth to.

  TOUCHING THE HAIR OF SUNRISE

  I shed sadness, happiness, and all of my ties to the world

  to become a white sheet of paper in front you.

  You sketch your gaze onto me,

  pure and puzzled,

  slender sunlight, crystal.

  The day’s pause,

  the wave’s embrace,

  deep valleys far away,

  rough seas.

  Our desires fly up

  simply

  and without color.

  Vowels, consonants

  engraved by the shaken rhythm of a naked heart.

  I touch the hair of sunrise,

  my lips the morning’s nightingale.

  JOURNEY OF THE HUMAN TRAIN

  I follow the winter, to curl up and sleep within Hà Nội.

  The sounds of incoming trains crawl over me.

  I have been through countless train st
ations:

  stations of suffering, loneliness, joy, and compassion.

  I listen to time speed towards its destination,

  leaving behind the stops of life,

  leaving behind my two-year-old childhood.

  Persian lilacs on my shoulders, I run along red dirt roads,

  the grass yellowing in the strong Laotian winds.

  Back then my hair was black.

  I left behind my mother with her creaking bamboo baskets.

  Her footsteps called the sun to rise.

  Her footsteps led the sun’s way.

  Oh mother,

  why are the Persian lilacs still purple after all these days?

  The train carries me at the speed of light.

  Behind me, the moon of an eighteen-year-old,

  the sunset emerald with my first kiss.

  I speed through forgetfulness; I leave the thousand longings

  behind.

  Tonight, the hooting of trains carries me back to the first station

  where I pick up my two-year-old childhood,

  toddling along the red dirt road,

  listening to the afternoon’s winds from Laos

  blow the sunset into endless depths.

  QUẢNG TRỊ*