Dear Friends,

Huu Loan, one of the brightest poets of Vietnam in 20th century has passed away today at the age of 95.

This man got my whole respect: talented, brave, upright. He sacrified for the country, yet to receive anything.



The poem “Berryflower Violet” is considered the greatest love poem of Vietnam ever. He quited army and lived a mysterious life in the countryside, doing hard hand to mouth jobs from 1955 til death.

Berryflower Violet

She had three brothers in the army
The younger ones
some weren’t yet talking
When her hair was still soft

I was a soldier
away from home
Loving her as a little sister
The wedding day
she didn’t ask for a new dress
I wore army uniform
The hobnail boots
Battlemud-smeared
Lovely she smiled
beside the odd husband

I came back from the front
Wedding done, I left.
From the far war zone
I thought of her, uneasy
Marrying in war time
Who leaves and would return?
If I don’t come back
how pitied would it be
for the little wife waiting
in the country evenings…

Yet the boy in the firing lines didn’t die
but died
the little girl behind
I came back
seeing her not
My mother sat by her tomb in darkness
The wedding day’s flowerpot
had become an incense vessel
besieged in expired coldness

Her hair was soft
too short to pin up
O my beloved, the last minute
we couldn’t hear each other
we couldn’t see each other even once
Those days she loved violet berryflowers
Her dress was berryflower violet
Those days
night lamp
small shadow
She mended for her husband the shirt
those days…

An afternoon
rain over the forest
the three brothers in the northeastern front
received words of the sister’s death
before the wedding news
An early autumn wind
made the river waters creep
The little brother grew up
lost
looking at the sister’s picture
When came the early autumn wind
the grass withered by the tombstone

In the afternoons
my platoon passes through berry hills
berryflower hills infinitely long in the afternoons
Berryflower violet
endlessly purples the desolate afternoons
Looking at the torn shirt shoulder
I sing
in the flower’s color
“My shirt is torn by the seam
My wife died
My mother has not yet mended it.”

HUU LOAN - 1949