Three Poems

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
I mean it’s not like my damned soul
and walks outdoors,
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star.
waved farewell with a lace hanky
and keeps on walking,
Trailing clouds of glory do we come
from the base of a bonsai plant
because of a church
From God, who is our home:
in a Tu Do Street floral shop
that stands somewhere in the East.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
while I dreamt too soundly
And his children
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
on Ba Muy Ba Beer and woke next morning
say blessings on him as if he were dead.
Upon the growing boy,
to discover
And another man,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
I couldn’t cry anymore
who remains inside his own house,
He sees it in his joy;
or laugh like before
dies there,
The Youth, who daily further from the east
or give a shit period-
inside the dishes and in the glasses,
Must travel, still is nature’s priest,
No.
so that his children
And by the vision splendid
My soul just did
have to go far out into the world
Is on his way attended;
what most souls did.
Toward that same church
At length the man perceives it die away,
Just disappeared one afternoon
which he forgot.
And fade into the light of common day.
When I was in a firefight.

Selected lines from poems by Wordsworth, Mason, and Rilke