"The bird has its nest, man has his ancestors." Every human being has a native land, a source to turn back to. There dwell the forebears, grandparents, parents, kin, brothers and sisters of one blood; there are kept sacred memories no life can erase. Yet an age of war and dispersion cast so many into the loss of country and home, drawing after it the heart-rending tragedies of the exile’s fate. Đinh Nho Tiêu’s poem "Lạc mất một quê hương" ("Having lost a homeland") — 16th generation, branch B of the Đinh Nho lineage — is precisely such a sob: the cry of a son who has lost his homeland even within his own mind.

From the very first lines, the author sets the reader before a bitter paradox of fate:

The refrain "Not once…" returns insistently, like shock, like a start of dismay. Within his heart he never truly wished to set out, and so never told himself that "to leave is farewell." He never spoke words of parting, and so never imagined he would have to "vow to return one day." Then the whirlwind of dispersion drove his wandering steps, and life’s tragedy left him unable, not even once, to come back.

And so, though he cannot set foot on his native soil again, in his mind the homeland rises clearly, with a clenching pain. Huế — emblem of culture, the ancient, peaceful, venerable capital — appears before the exile in the guise of the silent Thiên Mụ pagoda, "sitting and weeping over the ruins" of the age.

Far from the land that bore him, the reality of exile appears bare and merciless:

The three "No!"s at the head of each couplet are like three curt, bitter shakes of the head. They push away every illusion and force the man to face a pitiless reality. Among the yellow leaves of the foreign land, the poet sees neither beauty nor the peace of life, but only "his old mother’s eyes clouded with tears, still waiting." That image is a blade drawn across the heart: back home the aged mother watches day and night, while far away the homesick son knows only helplessness and a choked throat.

That sorrow multiplies when spring knocks at the door. Each spring — the season of reunion and gathering — the lyric self "weeps in silence beside the yellow blossoms." That yellow is the colour of the peach branch, the apricot spray of Tết back home, the colour of an old, peaceful memory. And the height of the tragedy comes before "the graves of exile": how many carried the dream of return, only to bury it at last with their own remains on a stranger’s land.

Then all the accumulated pain and helplessness burst into a mute cry in the final stanza:

The two rhetorical questions — "I did not leave!!! How did I become a man of exile? / I have not returned!!! How have I lost a homeland?" — voice an extreme bewilderment and panic. There are exiles that come from no choice, but from the drift of life, turning a man in an instant into a stranger within his own existence.

The call "O Homeland!!!", scanned with cascading exclamations, rises like a heart-rending sob before the cruelty of time. "The skin has wrinkled, the eyes have dimmed, the hair begins to grey": when old age has come and time runs dry, all glory won in a foreign land turns meaningless. The one desire still holding his life is the wisdom that "the falling leaf returns to its root": "I long only to return, to await death within the Homeland."

The poem closes on a suspended question: "half a lifetime, or a whole existence of endless drifting?!!" The line leaves in the reader’s heart a boundless sorrow. This is not the tragedy of one individual alone, but the shared weeping of a whole generation doomed to exile, carrying all its life the aching dream of return, to the very last breath.

Read Đinh Nho Tiêu’s poem →