ACE WAR POET: Pham Tien Duat dies
news item:
VietNamNet Bridge — After many days in pain, poet Pham Tien Duat passed away at Hanoi Military Hospital 108 on December 4, 2007, at the age of 66.
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Pham Tien Duat was a resistance poet who celebrated his companions on the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. These were people whose realities were saturated with war, unlike most of us here in W.Va., today, who are at war, the rhythms of our days relatively untouched.
A first installment of a three-part collection of works by Duat was recently published, the poems (the other two volumes to be prose). That volume, out just in time for him to see it published before he died of lung cancer, has 139 poems out of the hundreds he wrote.
Nguyen Ba Chung is a poet whose essays and translations have appeared in publications around the world. In Nguyen’s historical essay back in 1996, I found several lines by Duat about a village he travelled through where women and children wore white bands on their heads, in mourning for people who died fighting:
White Circle
Bomb smoke rises in black circles;
White circles hover along the ground.
My friend and I walk on in silence,
The silence expected after war.
There is no greater loss than death.
A white mourning band takes the shape of a zero.
My friend, inside that white circle
A head burns with fire.
