Let Us Love

Yêu Nhau
Let Us Love

Of the many Song Viet-Dam Giang poems, Let Us Love epitomizes the romance and charm that is the hallmark of her works. At the heart of this terse statement is elegance of expression and delicateness of feelings. The persona is a woman alone, but not necessarily lonely, who talks about love, and what it means to her at a certain point in time. Absent in the picture is the man to whom she addresses her thoughts and feelings. As I think about this, it strikes me that the poet uses a very deft device to convey her meaning. She leaves her readers to grapple with the circumstance as best they can. She lets their imagination roam freely, in reality, in reverie, or in fantasy.
In my effort to grope for a way to interpret these beautiful verses, I ran into a bewildering array of possibilities, each of which claims a degree of validity and plausible nuances. They appear to me, however, to coalesce around two viable ones, the literal and the fantasy.
On the literal level, a claim based on the direct unvarnished reading of the words may be sustained and defensible.There are overt references to passion, and the physical such as the skin, the hair and the lips. Although we know nothing about the man, the poem leaves little doubt about the depth of the love she has for him. How else can it be with all the yearnings for his touch? This love is no ordinary love, however. It is the kind of love that is tender, deeply felt, pervasive, irresistible, and powerful for its ability to arouse so much stir and effusion in her heart.
On the other level, it is pure fantasy, pure dream. The woman depicted could be any woman engaged in reverie. She leaves the world of reality for a dream that may or may not come true. She constructs for herself a world in which all she wishes for may be expressed without fear or shame. Because this world exists only in her heart, in her dream, no one will ever know or care. In this safe haven, she fantasizes about a love that she shapes to her heart's desire. It is she who gives free rein to her emotion in fantasy, and hence, it is she who can leave this realm at the time of her own choosing.
The most romantic moments in her fantasy occur in the moonlight when she offers the man in her dream the sweetness of her lips and the fragrance of her hair. I can hardly conceive of a picture that can rival the beauty and poetry of their presence in the moonlit landscape, projecting their silhouettes against the star-studded sky. It is simply a marvelous dream, which the moon fosters, and which engenders enough excitement and anticipation to set their hearts soaring to heights of passion hardly attained under other circumstances.
But fantasy or no, the experience is real and delightful to her. And here lies the poet's skill: she leads her readers gently to an experience they will likely remember for a long time to come.
Somehow I have the urge to indulge in a fantasy of my own, that all the levels of meaning are actually just a mental construct I like to toy with, and that the real experience is not so easy to sort out in neat categories. I do not pretend to intellectual objectivity, for few can be intellectually objective when confronted with the topic of love. You deal with it as best you can. And so, I hope I may be forgiven for my own peculiar approach that commingles reverie, fantasy and reality. What do I mean? My answer: Does it really matter? Does it really matter when I can experience through this poem a measure of happiness that is so elusive in life?
In just six verses full of evocative imagery and an equally pregnant vocabulary of love, Song Viet-Dam Giang has given me cherished moments of joy, and a genuine appreciation of her consummate artistry. Her refined sense of aesthetics can only be equaled by her ability to move her readers and tug at their heartstrings with the charm of this poem of love.
Above all, the poem gives me an opportunity to pause and think about love and its meaning, and to relearn the lesson of how precious love is.
TDL

Let Us Love

Let us love with burning passion, my dear,
Spread your mantle of love on my skin sheer.

Love me in the moonlit night and drink in
My sweet lips, and smell my soft fragrant hair.

Let us give each other the fullest love
In rapture and eternal ecstasy.

TDL
26 July 2003


Yêu nhau

Yêu nhau say đắm nồng nàn
Yêu như mưa phủ trên làn da em

Yêu nhau trong ánh trăng đêm
Uống môi em ngọt, tóc mềm thoảng hương

Cho nhau chất ngất yêu thương
Để niềm xúc cảm mãi vương đọng đầy

Sóng Việt
17 June 2000