Heart Friend

Heart Friend

The sea contains memories of Life’s beginnings.

Lonely footsteps imprinted on the silent sand...

Night sea waves reverberate an ever-changing nostalgic melody.

On the mountaintop, the tilted moon lies waiting for whom.

A jug of wine amidst the far end of the world.

A heart friend, whence to seek, since eons ago.

In the heart of this vast, misty universe,

whence was my previous self, that was like a dream...

The roads in Life have many mulberry-fields-becoming-sea changing events.

Old dreams have now faded with the passage of Time.

Tilting a jug of wine in the middle of the night,

across the stream of the Subconscious,

I travel back to the olden days...

I dream of drinking with Li Bai.

Three hundred cups of wine not enough for this festive night.

The Hoang River flows to the sea and never return.

Hair like silk in the morn, silver in the night.

The thousand-year melancholy, the classic verse

Beauties and poet scholars, ephemeral… like clouds’ shadows…

A thousand cups of verse and wine not enough to get high.

Let’s leave the sadness of Life all behind.

On whose house, the bright moon shines from afar tonight?

O “The Twelfth of June”, when love tears of rain falling…

O the poet of love and wine, please don’t be melancholy!

Here are cups of verse and wine for you to fill and empty.

A heart friend, whence to meet by chance,

in the ever-changing flow of Infinite Space and Time…

Translated by Vuong Thanh