By the cemetery on Millington Street

(translated by Nguyen Minh Triet)

Then I'll be laying there in the chill

My head will be toward the western hill

The silhouette of the city looks hazy in gray evenings

My resting place will be covered with leaves that are falling.

The forest shows leafless trees

The white cross is barely visible in the mist

Is there still a heaven

For an expatriated spirit?

My eyes will look to the east sorrowfully

In thousand of miles away is my old country.

The place where my body and my poems lie

has no earth heap or mound as it should be.

How can you come to my funeral

To give me a sad farewell bouquet at all?

(If you could've made it,

Instead of flowers, please give me a kiss)

The grass on my grave is rotten or yellow

But it's better than Dam Tien's tomb in the old years

The only thing worse is no incense of sorrow

Or anybody around to shed a tear

Also, nobody knows how to read

The Vietnamese statement on the tombstone in the graveyard:

"Here rests a Vietnamese poet

Who died of nostalgia"

· THE WRITERS POST (ISSN: 1527-5467),
the magazine of Literature & Literature-in-translation.

Volume 4, Number 2 July 2002

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