Tác giả: Triệu Nguyên Tâm
The Prisoner ‘s Eyes Before Execution
You are born to be guilty
Guilty of seeking freedom
Guilty because of your so revengeful look
That’s why your head keep bleeding from the strikes of rifle butt.
You are born to be in jail
‘Cause of protesting poems you kept writing
The poems burning with boiling blood
Of countless human suffering under this oppression.
You are born to do nothing but protesting
Revealing the crimes, the injustice and unfairness.
That’ s why they beat you to the pulp
Leaving you with agonizing pain while you try to pray.
You are born to be chained
Walking with pain in the unknown and far away prison
Begging for a handful of rice for your emty stomach
Still, you continue to fight for the human rights
You are born into slavery and squalor
Your back filled with scars from the whipping ropes
Your tears drying as days and months going by.
The woman you love already forgot that you even exist.
You are born to be on the dead-row inmates
Violent and blood thirsty regime will take your life
They treat you like barbarians
But your poems are here for ever!
They will last hundred of years or more
And nobody can destroy them, not this regime or next ones
These dictators themselves will disappear into oblivion,
Like all of them in the past.
Tonight is your last night
With sunken eyes you look at the shining moon
The cold breeze brushing your face
You know that it’s time for you to say good bye.
In the early dawn you stand facing the executors’ riffles
You ask them not to blindfold you
So you can look at the blue sky for the last time
Your eyes, the prisoner’ s eyes are smiling.
As the bullets exploded, piercing your body, red blood gushing out, soaking your white clothes.
Triệu Nguyên Tâm
March 6, 2021.
You are born to be guilty
Guilty of seeking freedom
Guilty because of your so revengeful look
That’s why your head keep bleeding from the strikes of rifle butt.
You are born to be in jail
‘Cause of protesting poems you kept writing
The poems burning with boiling blood
Of countless human suffering under this oppression.
You are born to do nothing but protesting
Revealing the crimes, the injustice and unfairness.
That’ s why they beat you to the pulp
Leaving you with agonizing pain while you try to pray.
You are born to be chained
Walking with pain in the unknown and far away prison
Begging for a handful of rice for your emty stomach
Still, you continue to fight for the human rights
You are born into slavery and squalor
Your back filled with scars from the whipping ropes
Your tears drying as days and months going by.
The woman you love already forgot that you even exist.
You are born to be on the dead-row inmates
Violent and blood thirsty regime will take your life
They treat you like barbarians
But your poems are here for ever!
They will last hundred of years or more
And nobody can destroy them, not this regime or next ones
These dictators themselves will disappear into oblivion,
Like all of them in the past.
Tonight is your last night
With sunken eyes you look at the shining moon
The cold breeze brushing your face
You know that it’s time for you to say good bye.
In the early dawn you stand facing the executors’ riffles
You ask them not to blindfold you
So you can look at the blue sky for the last time
Your eyes, the prisoner’ s eyes are smiling.
As the bullets exploded, piercing your body, red blood gushing out, soaking your white clothes.
Triệu Nguyên Tâm
March 6, 2021.