(Gửi Tác Giả Mặt Trận Ở Saigon - Ngô Thế Vinh)
He has left the war
But the war has not left him alone
Like a smouldering suture
It sticks to his chest
Gently he peels off the scabs
Turning stitches into loose leaves
Full of injuries
Abandoned burned out villages
B52 craters defacing the ground
Not a single child
Not a single elder
What can be as painful
As heartbreaking
As seeing among debris
Someone carrying a corpse on his back
During a deafening and blinding storm
In an abandoned Khmer temple
A son of God
Entrusting a fellow warrior’s soul to Buddha
Alas, war
Alas, injury of a century
Were God and Buddha there, too?
A war without name
A death without trademark
A soldier on this side is named an enemy by the other side
Man no longer fears beasts
But he does his own kind
There are things during your whole life
That utterly defy your understanding
Why is that birth in the north and death in the south
Became a battle cry for massive killing frenzies
And who came up with that terrifying slogan
Deaths that were odd and senseless
Death by sound of rotors of a helicopter hovering over a landing zone
Obsession with long years of fright
An odd death on the battlefield
A death without bleeding
Uncovering the injury under the seal on his chest
He will hear exhausted screams
By his Allied Force warriors
Who had come to Vietnam and brought back handicaps and endless nightmares
Never can they return to an ordinary life
As war still fills up their bodies
Like a shaking pitcher of water that refuses to tumble down
Under that wound he still can peel off dry scabs
Like those who chose to stay
And wholeheartedly performed their duties until they were discarded
They attended to the mishaps of others and forgot about their own
What else can be found under that wound of his
Each day he loses a dry scab
That he cannot replace
And he has forgotten
Like the fallen and forgotten soldiers
“When the living forget the dead, the dead will die once more.”
Yet there was a time
When coming back from the killing fields
Those pitiful soldiers
Had to face the city battlefield
From jungle outposts they were taken to the capital
To protect and appease people who cried for war
But they themselves stood by the sidelines
And suddenly the soldiers turned into lonely beasts
Bewildered in the middle of the Saigon battlefield
Alas, years have gone by
He stayed behind
He went to jail
He left
He ponders on life vicissitudes
He peels off scabs over his wound
Wondering what remains
What else can be let go
Is it too late for a homecoming
tmt
Tháng 9-11-2020
[Translated from the Vietnamese by Đàm Trung Pháp]
