The Tale of Mother Vietnam-Sample 2

MẸ — THE MOTHERS OF THE LAND
THE MATERNAL VOICES

Governments rise and fall in a single day.
But a mother never stops counting her children.

Vietnam has long spoken
of one Mother.

She is Mother Vietnam,
the quiet mother
who gathers every child
under the same sky.

But like many old families of the land,
the household of Father Vietnam
was never simple.

Across the long body of the country,
four regional mothers
raised their children in different ways.

One Mother in the North,
where winters are cold,
where discipline grows like bamboo,
and ideology filled the schools.

One Mother in the Central land,
narrow and storm-beaten,
where hardship teaches endurance,
where flood and drought
shape everyday life.

One Mother in the South,
where rivers open wide
and laughter comes easily,
where Saigon never sleeps.

And one Mother in the Mekong Delta,
where water and earth mingle
and life follows the tides,
a place where people are honest,
and rice feeds the entire nation.

Different mothers.

Different accents.

Different manners.

Different temperaments.

Across the country
children even call their mothers
by four different names
for mother.

In northern villages
old voices still remember — U and Bu.

In the Central land
children call softly for Mạ.

In the South
voices ring across the rice fields — Má!

Elsewhere the familiar word — Mẹ
binds them all together.

Different sounds.

Different spellings.

Different accents.

Yet every voice
means the same thing:
Mother.

Above them all
stands Mother Vietnam,
who does not divide her children
even when history does.

Sometimes she speaks
for the whole family.

And sometimes
she lets the regional mothers
speak for their own children.

THE FOUR REGIONAL MOTHERS SPEAK

On the day the war ended,
four mothers raised their voices.

The Northern Mother asked:
How many of my sons died for victory,
for the sake of the nation’s unity?

The Central Mother asked:
How many of my daughters suffered?
How many became widows,
how many cried for their fathers?

The Southern Mother cried:
How many children have fled the country
in the night without goodbye
before the nation remembers them?

The Mother of the Mekong River whispered:
How many of my children,
who once planted rice in these fields,
have drifted downstream
after even the fish have been fed already?

If these lines reopen old wounds,

please forgive the hand that wrote them.

They were written with tears,
so the lost would not be forgotten.

And Mother Vietnam
still calls her children home.