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Hôm kia nhận được thơ nàng
Bảo rằng đã gặp được chàng thơ say
Dưới trăng chàng cứ cầm tay
Loanh quanh lối mộng, bước hoài trong mơ

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Trên biển vắng, cơn mưa chiều lạnh rát
Ngày buông tay cùng mây nước ơ hờ
Tôi trơ trọi như vỏ sò trên cát
Lăn thản nhiên theo vạt sóng xô bờ

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Forty years!
Losing the country, the home, I feel alone like a waif;
Not knowing how many friends are still alive or dead
For all of us are scattering around the earth.
Can anyone tell who wants to leave the motherland
And will be buried in foreign sand?
Forty years have drifted with the mass’ grief and pain
Off their strength and hopeless faith being major drain!
Nearly half of a person’s life – that’s long enough
For people’s will of taking the nation out of the tough.

No one forgets forty years have come and gone;
The end of April one-nine-seven-five that lingers on
It’s when heaven-earth-human tumble like a stone
As the Vietnamese suffer miseries that pall
Over April 30, 75 – as ghosts and devils call
Up the tanks of north enemies that smashed city lanes
And knocked down Independence Palace gates
Amidst toadies’ singing enemy’s praises by the quasi-literati,
The traitors, and of the opportunistic puppets.

Forty years, they have lived in crazy haste,
And “grab and go” everything their hands could paste.
The war ending pushed the whole nation backward
And people enjoy living in heavenly socialist awkward.
Their weird liberty that requires permission
For restroom use and bathroom admission.
They claim themselves possessing top worldly ken
And preach their phantomic doctrine to the lumpen.
Chief of State Nguyễn Minh Triết declared in Cuba, “Vietnam socialist,
Cuba will take turn to guard and keep peace for the world … of communist.

Congress chair Nguyễn Sinh Hùng, a big frog in the petty water
Once stated, Congress is people; people have to pay the piper
When congress is wrong; no way to complain.
Deputy Prime Minister Nguyễn Đức Đam talked foolishly,
If our young people aren’t taught to shed tears when singing
The anthem, our country won’t become rich and developing.
Yet, Trần Hữu Vinh, a ranking official in education, spoke irrationally:
Putting ADHD students in the arms of Morpheus using sleep pill
Is fairly normal. Don’t make a mountain out of that molehill.

Trương Tấn Sang, a state chairperson, behaves like a transient:
“The sovereignty of our nation – if we can’t have it this year, try next then;
If ten years we still can’t get it, then other ten or twenty more years.”
To deal with our enemy from the North has always afflicted us numerous ten.
Even worse, Defense Minister, Phùng Quang Thanh, boasted:
Relationship between Viet-China is at utmost trusted.
Or Nguyễn Xuân Hồng, an insane director of veggie protection agency affirmed:
Contaminated potatoes from China are still safe.
And advice from Minister of Public Health, Nguyễn Thị Kim Tiến:
If my child or grandchild contracted measles, I would never dare
Send them to the central hospital for treatment or care.

State advisor and revolutionary philosopher Vũ Khiêu showed his malice:
At 99 he is still fond of embracing and kissing Kỳ Duyên, a beautiful MC,
And plagiarizes other’s work for his cheap parallel sentences.
All of his faults have been uncovered and criticized by the daily.
(What a regime; it’s like a group of half fish, half foul species!)
Reading the advisor’s compliments makes us laugh our heads off.
Yet, another effort to rewrite Kiều Story by Minh Xuân Đỗ, an engineer.
Alas! My motherland has been suffering miseries for forty years.
All are brought about by those mentally-illed leaders.

I burst out laughing at these ideas
As to think about what Dương Thu Hương, a writer, exclaimed in tears:
“In this war, the civilized regime was overrun by a group of evil domineers.
(She squatted by a sidewalk and cried bitterly in the heart of Saigon.)
I myself wanted to wail like a child
For I knew I was helpless when the sun had set.
My legs were terribly tired as the eyelids were wet;
My mouth was dry and as bitter as black bile
As the happy past roamed on the mind.

Reminiscence of April, 2015

{1}
Once all villagers decided to pray for rain.
On the day of prayer, all the people gathered,
but only one boy came with an umbrella.
That’s FAITH

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