Original illustration by Anne Le Guern

Listen:

Riding an ant, we seek a fairy’s cave
A realm of long life, where butterflies flutter
Where toads and frogs wander, looking for food
Where, in a deep hole, a snake dreams

At the cave’s mouth, a circle of dancing bees
A forest flower paints her sensuous face
Shamed by their lack of beauty, old reeds rise
And become a fairy with fluttering white hair

Weary ants crawl around, searching for food
On our backs: a debt of gratitude and love
The same destiny, lost in a strange land
Same affection, felt in the faint sunlight

We ask the ant: Where is the Pure Land —
Beyond emptiness, there, in the tracks of birds
Away from the call of the black, bitter earth
Where the light of thought takes over from the sun?

We call to the ants, to faltering silver clouds
As we travel along the road, our troubled country
We peel back the past, astonishing deities
And bite infinity, breaking the dream in two

The country has been pensive since that day
When late-night forest fires loved dead leaves
Now we seek a heart that’s been broken
Hungry for time, we gnaw at nothingness

Tuệ Sỹ
Born in 1943, Tuệ Sỹ joined a Buddhist order at age ten and is recognized as one of the most important Buddhist scholars in Vietnam. A scholar of both Eastern and Western philosophy, he has published numerous works on Buddhism, including General Outline of Zen. Imprisoned from 1978 to 1981 and again from 1984 to 1998 for political reasons, he has lived in Ho Chi Minh City since his release.

Martha Collins
Martha Collins has published eleven volumes of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and Because What Else Could I Do (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), which won a William Carlos Williams Award. Collins has also published several volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, including the forthcoming Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tuệ Sỹ (Milkweed Editions, 2023), and has coedited a number of volumes, including, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press, 2017).
http://marthacollinspoet.com

Nguyen Ba Chung
Nguyen Ba Chung is a writer, poet, and translator. His essays and translations have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-translated over a dozen volumes of poetry and prose, including A Time Far Past, Distant Road, Six Vietnamese Poets, and the forthcoming Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tuệ Sỹ (Milkweed Editions, 2023). He was, for many years, associated with the William Joiner Institute at UMass Boston, where he was responsible for bringing Vietnamese writers to Boston and translating their work.