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Memory

Author: 
Nguyen Bao Chan

Reading from Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus festival, 2012. Reading in Vietnamese.

Translated from the Vietnamese by the author:
 
Memory
 
Memory is playing I-spy
With the things one remembers
 
It finds a wooden doll
And dreams of the forest
 
It picks up a shell
And hears the ocean
 
It sees the early sunlight
And feels warm kisses
 
It brushes bare skin
And is burned by love’s embers
 
It sips the night dew
And feels an old thirst again
 
It touches the river
And the ripples run away
 
It hides itself
And discovers the sky
 
It turns round
And falls into the abyss...