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THANH
TON
_______________________________
ON
THE 30th DAY
AFTER
MY CHILD’S BIRTH
During
one month after your birth what did you see
made
you cry and smile what did you hear?
I
now was in this far-off place where the sun woke
with
the sound of gunfire echoing dejectedly.
You
were born in a surgical clinic,
kind
of clinic purposed for the present war. Your crying
mixed
with the yelling and the screaming
of
men losing their arms, and women their legs.
People
died, at the moment you were born,
of
a stray bullet, of a falling bomb.
Our
country twisted her body wearily,
and
the two-note lulling ‘a-oi’ the war had buried.
As
you were just four-day old my part I took
in
the fighting, learning to gun and stab
through
human heart
The
war was blind, as was the crying eyes
of
your Grand mom. The war now smiled
like
the green grass on the tomb.
Instead
of Dad, Mom shall raise you by hand
Of
human life did you get any sense?
Beyond
all measure was the disguised hatred
on
the tips of those tongues,
Beyond
all measure was the separation
camouflaged
by those smiling lips.
My
senses now were mute and deaf,
that
was caused by guns, bombs, and sadness.
You
shall grow up, and you shall know
The
nearness, the separateness among human love
Thirty
days in this life, you’ve been
happily
carried, in the family’s joy, by one member
then
others. But through our village and our hamlet
the
noise of the gunfire resounded,
the
gap in our motherland how were you to fill up.
(Translated
by N. Saomai from the Vietnamese text in Thanh Ton’s poetry collection ‘Thap tinh’ published in
1969 in Vietnam)
· THE WRITERS POST (ISSN: 1527-5467),
the magazine of Literature & Literature-in-translation.
VOLUME 7 ISSUE 1 JAN 2005
Editorial note: Works published in this issue may be
simultaneously published in the printed Wordbridge Magazine Issue 6 January
2005 (ISSN: 1540-1723).
Copyright © N. Saomai & The Writers Post 1999-2005.
Nothing in this issue may be downloaded, distributed, or reproduced without
the permission of the author/ translator/ artist/ The Writers Post/ and Wordbridge magazine. Creating links to
place The Writers Post or any of its pages within other framesets or in other
documents is copyright violation, and is not permitted.
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