
- Publisher: Milkweed Editions
- Available in: Paperback
- ISBN: 978-1-63955-018-0
- Available: June 13, 2023
More Poems from this Book
“Street at Noon” at AGNI
“A Slender Moon” at Waxwing
“Descending the Mountain” at Waxwing
Sitting in the Graveyard” at Tupelo Quarterly
More about this Book
See this Translators’ Note in Waxwing
Translated by Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins
Dreaming the Mountain is a moving depiction of a mind seeking freedom in a chaotic world: the doubts and certainties, the careful, profound observations, and, ultimately, the dedication to liberation. It belongs with the greats of wartime poetry and Buddhist literature, but it’s also a generous companion for any of us seeking to understand this human life. —Rachel Abrams, Tricycle Magazine
[Tuệ] Sỹ is a master of blending the body and its surroundings, making the metaphysical tangible. –Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation
If there’s loneliness in these poems, it’s the loneliness of a soul aware of his small place among a mysterious immensity, an immensity that includes the butterfly wing, the bending grass, the wet eyes of a love. And it’s the loneliness that somehow, powerfully, makes one feel less alone. —Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe
THE YEARS AWAY
The wind gave you ten long years of wandering
Seeing your country only in its ruin
The Eastern Sea still whispers to white sand
Tales of compassion, breath of the Truong Son
Ten more years you were silent in the city
Love for the forest brought you close to tears
Arms reached for the sky, the birds’ late chirping
Life adrift, small wings closing up by the road
Ten years later you crossed streams and forests
Saw your country as bloody abandoned fields
Evening smoke fades like wounded souls
Each river, each stream of blood and tears overflows
For ten years you forgot your reed-thin weakness
On slender shoulders a new country rose
You bent your head to hear mountain and forest
Chanting the endless love song of the East
The day you came back to the ancient city
The roads were still shadowed with sorrow’s smoke
Eyes still glint with timeless indignation
As fresh as rain in the borderlands, as true