The Power of Poetry
To me life by day is artificial.
Labouring in shame, usually faint with hunger,
In trivial chatter, I tease away everything.
My release seems unnecessary,
It's only with the coming of the night that I fully
Live, bitterly, past, present and future.
My heart, my brain, tense and intensified
Bearing the blossoming buds and poetry.
My poems, though they may have the shape of flowers,
Explode with a power that is ten thousandfold.
1972
I Kept Silent
I kept silent when I was tortured by my enemy:
With iron and with steel, soul faint in agony —
The heroic stories are for children to believe.
I kept silent because I kept telling myself:
Has anyone, who entered the jungle and who was run over by the wild beast
Been stupid enough to open his mouth and ask for mercy?
1974
Planting Peanuts
Peanut seeds were sown, mixed with ash and dung.
To keep prisoners from tasting them DDT was added.
And did the prisoners touch them?
In the end, tons of peanut seeds were secretly eaten.
Though peanut seeds in the ground
could not sprout
thanks to the 'fertiliser'
the Party announced
that its Winter-Spring project
was successfully completed all the same.
1962
-- Nguyen Chi Thien, taken from "Poems Smuggled from Vietnam," Index on Censorship, March 1982.
