THE POEM I CAN’T YET NAME
By Nguyen Phan Que Mai (Vietnamese Poet)
Translated by Bruce Weigl (American Poet)

My hands lift high a bowl of rice, the seeds harvested
in the field where my grandmother was laid to rest.
Each rice seed tastes sweet as the sound of lullaby
from the grandmother I never knew.
I imagine her soft face as they laid her down into the earth,
her clothes battered, her skin stuck to her bones;
in the Great Hunger of 1945*, my village
was starved for graves to bury all the dead.
Nobody could find my grandmother’s grave,
so my father tasted bitter rice for sixty-five years.

After sixty-five years of searching,
spirits of my ancestors led my father and me
to my grandmother’s grave.
I heard my father call “Mum,” for the first time;
the rice field behind his back trembled.

My feet clung to the mud.
I listened in the burning incense how my grandmother’s soul
spread,
joining the earth, taking root in the field,
where she quietly sang lullabies, calling the rice plants to blossom.

Lifting the bowl of rice in my hands, I count every seed,
each one glistening with the sweat of my ancestors,
their backs bent in the rice fields,
the fragrance of my grandmother’s lullaby alive on each one.

* The Vietnamese Famine of 1945 occurred in northern Vietnam from October 1944 to May 1945, during the Japanese occupation of French Indochina in World War II. Between 400,000 and 2 million people are estimated to have starved to death during this time.

Born into the Vietnam War in 1973, Nguyen Phan Que Mai grew up witnessing the war’s devastation and its aftermath. She worked as a street vendor and rice farmer before winning a scholarship to attend university in Australia. Upon her return to Vietnam, Que Mai contributed to the sustainable development of her homeland via her work with local and international organizations including UN agencies. She is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in Vietnamese.

Her poems are fiercely loyal to the sentiments they gracefully express, which is what we mean when we talk about honesty in poetry. Ms. Nguyen is never hesitant to take on grand ideas, and never hesitant to rely on a sometimes raw and direct talk in order to expose the phenomena of our lives. She is a poet of a Vietnamese version of romanticism, in which she finds her subjects among the so-called ordinary lives of so-called ordinary people, and she celebrates not the accomplishments of kings or emperors, but of regular Vietnamese citizens, like the grandma in the poem, who have struggled to stay alive, feed their families, and find their way back home after long, war-inflicted years of exile and despair. Hers is a poetry that instructs us on how to live more fully in the world, and reaffirms the power of clear-headed and direct poetry to transform even our darkest hours into deeply abiding lessons on the complexities of

Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s “The Poem I Can’t Yet Name” is a tender and elegiac tribute to ancestry, memory, survival, and the sacredness of daily life. Rooted in personal and national history, this poem weaves together the trauma of war and famine with the resilience of generational love — especially the enduring presence of a grandmother the poet never met.

The tone is gentle, reverent, and quietly grieving, but never sentimental. It moves with the steady rhythm of ritual — of lifting rice, burning incense, bowing to memory. There is deep emotion in the poet’s voice, but it is controlled, restrained — shaped by respect and cultural humility.
Rice is central to the poem — not just as food, but as symbol. Each grain is rich with meaning:
“Each rice seed tastes sweet as the sound of lullaby / from the grandmother I never knew.”
Here, rice becomes a carrier of memory and maternal affection. It replaces the lost lullabies with nourishment. It is the body of the land and the body of the grandmother, feeding generations forward.

In the final lines, the speaker reflects:
“each one glistening with the sweat of my ancestors… the fragrance of my grandmother’s lullaby alive on each one.”
This elevates rice to a sacred, spiritual substance — a form of continuity, presence, and song. The act of eating rice becomes an act of remembrance and reverence.

As mentioned earlier the poem references a real and devastating historical event — the Vietnamese famine of 1945, in which over a million people died. The line:
“my village / was starved for graves to bury all the dead.”
is harrowing in its simplicity. The horror is not dramatized — it’s told with quiet devastation, making it all the more powerful. This sets the foundation for a deeply personal loss: the grandmother’s grave was lost amid mass death, and the father grew up without closure, tasting “bitter rice for sixty-five years.”

The poem builds toward the discovery of the grandmother’s resting place:
“spirits of my ancestors led my father and me / to my grandmother’s grave.”
There’s a spiritual dimension here — not mystical in a fantastical way, but deeply rooted in Vietnamese ancestral belief and rural sensibility. The land holds memory. Spirits guide the living.
“I heard my father call ‘Mum,’ for the first time.”
This is a moment of catharsis — the release of a son’s lifelong silence, the restoration of a broken link in the family chain. That the “rice field behind his back trembled” suggests that the earth itself acknowledges the reunion.

The poem is free verse, flowing like a stream of memory and reverence. Its images are earthy and tactile. There’s a fusion of body, earth, and spirit throughout the poem. The grandmother’s soul does not simply rest — it “joins the earth, takes root in the field”, singing lullabies to the rice itself.

This poem is as much about personal healing as it is about cultural survival — how memory, food, and ritual preserve identity and dignity even in the aftermath of unimaginable suffering.

To conclude, “The Poem I Can’t Yet Name” is a deeply moving elegy that speaks in whispers — but those whispers carry generations of grief, resilience, and reverence. Nguyen Phan Que Mai writes with a clarity and calmness that makes the emotional weight even more powerful. With rice as its central metaphor, the poem connects body, land, spirit, and memory into one sacred act of remembrance.

It is not just a poem about mourning — it is a poem about belonging, and how the dead continue to nourish the living.

Ref: The Secret of Hoa Sen by Nguyen Phan Que Mai. Translated by Bruce Weigl