BMR | Poetry | Three Poems by Lam Thi My Da, translated by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh

At Tet, people buy chickens in the market I bought a clay rooster when I was a child Now that earthen rooster lies in the earth But he's still crowing brightly against the sky Suddenly a rainbow sweeps before me Many beautiful flowers speak dreamy words In the flowers a small angel keeps appearing Her dark eyes waiting, full of anticipation Sometimes I think the soul is the color of Phai Street Its silent mossy tiles, its silent walls The morning weather, like being seventeen The leaves waking up, releasing their strange scent

I wait in rain for the Ha Long Bay ferry The storm churns black coffee in my cup Ha Long Bay, like a lover I've never met Desire is swirling anxiously in my heart How can it be that we might not meet? If it keeps storming, I might have to turn back Ha Long Bay—a beautiful dream Like you, forever distant Please let my imagination Fall like a leaf against your magical face Your handsome face that humbles the gods A wanderer's face, with dreamlike features I am resigned: I will become a desert And bow to say goodbye to you In the rain that falls on the far horizon Ha Long Bay is like an illusive lover A lover who doesn't exist in this life

Cock a-doo— Cock a-doo— The rooster fills his lungs with daylight The grandmother's broom sweeps layers of night away Moonlight dissolves in the white areca blossoms The boiling rice-pot sounds like a burst of rain The mother rolls up her pants And lifts her shoulder poles to carry seed The father exhales pipe smoke Breath by gray-blue breath Voices laugh in the distance In the mist by the village road Damp grass is barely visible Spiderwebs The river market is bustling Brimming with vegetables An oar rustles lightly The river trembles Night blooms Like an egg into day Dreaming birds sing in the trees Falling stars fill the cistern There's a lazy man Who often sleeps late This morning he wakes early And stands to watch the day break Now his idleness saddens him Because he knows it has made him lose All those clear cool dawns

Lam Thi My Da lives in Hue, Vietnam. She has published five collections of poems in Vietnam, as well as three books for children. Poem without Month or Year (1984) won the National Award for Poetry, and Dedicated to a Dream (1998) received highest honors from the National United Board of Vietnamese Literature and the Arts. Lam Thi My Da graduated from the Writers' College in Vietnam, studied literature at Gorky University in Russia, and served with the youth brigades and the women's engineering units during the American war in Vietnam; she has worked as a reporter and a literary editor, and has served on the Poetry Council of the Vietnam Writers' Association. Translations of her poems have been featured in Six Vietnamese Poets (Curbstone, 2002), as well as in Manoa, Poetry International, and Santa Fe Poetry Broadside. A bilingual edition of her poems, co-translated by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh, will be published by Curbstone Press in 2003.

Martha Collins is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which, Some Things Words Can Do, was published by Sheep Meadow in 1999. She has also co-translated, with the author, The Women Carry River Water, a collection of poems by Vietnamese poet Nguyen Quang Thieu, which was published by UMass in 1997 and won an award from the American Literary Translators Association in 1998. Collins is Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, where she also serves as one of the editors of FIELD.

Thuy Dinh is a writer and attorney living in the Washington, D.C. area. Her essays, film and book reviews have appeared in Amerasia Journal; Rain Taxi Review of Books; the anthology Once Upon a Dream: Twenty Years of Vietnamese-American Experience (Andrews and McMeel, 1995); Hop Luu Magazine and Viet Magnet. Since the fall of 2000, she has been working with Martha Collins in translating the poems of Lam Thi My Da. This year, a few of their translated poems have appeared in the anthology Six Vietnamese Poets, eds. Nguyen Ba Chung and Kevin Bowen (Curbstone: 2002); Manoa; Poetry International; the websites Santa Fe Poetry Broadside and Poetry Daily.