Lam Nguyen-Phuong
Two Early Poems
Lam Nguyen-Phuong fled Vietnam as a refugee, became the first Vietnamese student at Stanford Business School, and went on to co-found the private equity arm of Capital Group — leading investments across more than 130 countries. In 2018, he stepped away from finance entirely, returning to meditation, radical philanthropy, and the poetry he had quietly set aside for forty years.
Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, he wrote nearly fifty poems, arranged into three books: Sweet Innocent Love, Dreams of a New Earth, and Dreams of a New Humanity. His second poem — "The Stone Breaker" — poured out in fifteen minutes while he was fifteen, sweating profusely. It was almost a mystical experience; its symbolic content feels more valid today than it did then. By eighteen, the poems had grown more urgent: "Is injustice not enough? Do I have to catch the birds singing in the sky? Is oppression not enough? Do I have to raise marble palaces and snuff out the last dim flames in children's eyes?" The poet went into hiding because, as a non-white refugee on Wall Street in the 1970s who had to fight for his family's survival, he had to dismantle his identity simply to belong. "The poet was always inside me. Forty years of immersion veiled the poet, and I couldn't see him."
Below are two of his early poems. For more on Lam, see his Awakin Call here →
The Stone Breaker
Người Đập Đá
From Vùng Đất Mới · The New Land
Back bent under the harsh sun,
he summoned all the strength still left in him
to strike the stone —
strike, strike, without end.
He was exhausted.
His legs trembled,
sweat streamed down his body,
and purple veins bulged at his temples.
His eyes were glazed,
no longer seeing clearly.
He no longer saw what everyone else saw.
He had come to see
that this life was only an image.
The bright sun scorched patch after patch of his skin.
But he no longer felt pain.
Life had left a stain upon his soul,
a soul once pure and unblemished.
And yet now his heart no longer ached —
how much less, then, could it feel
these pains of the flesh.
He no longer felt pain.
He no longer felt hatred.
For he had seen.
For he had come to understand
that in this world,
nothing carries any absolute meaning.
Perhaps everything exists only
to help us become better,
to recognise truth,
and to draw nearer to the Source.
Understanding this, he felt joy —
even if he lived in circumstances
the world would call tragic.
He felt joy because all his actions and thoughts
now bent toward something higher.
Yes, he no longer felt anger or resentment.
Now, his soul brimmed with love and hope.
He felt love for humankind more than ever before.
His only regret was
that in all his life
he had done nothing to help people see themselves —
to help them find their way out of the river of desire
and become people of tomorrow,
prophets of a new land,
so that they too might know
the same lightness and joy that he knew,
however deep the poverty
of spiritual or material circumstance
in which they lived.
He felt love, too, for those
who had brought humanity to its present state —
those who embodied the old land
he was about to leave behind,
souls yet unevolved —
pity for those who did wrong
without ever weighing the cost.
Tired as he was,
each blow fell harder than the last.
For he felt his spirit rise,
sensing that he drew near
to the place where all things are good.
All that remained was to spend out
the last days of this withering flesh
here on earth —
breaking stones,
breaking apart the final chains
of mad evil still trying to hold him.
He was serving a life sentence of hard labour.
x x xThen one day, without warning,
the world fell silent.
The stony hill changed shape.
The sunlight changed colour.
The prison gate swung open wide.
And he saw, all at once,
that he had come home —
that all along, he had been home.
Translated with the help of Claude.
The Bird Singing in the Sky
Con Chim Hót Trên Trời
Is all that injustice not enough —
must you want me
to go catch the bird singing in the sky,
must you strip away
the last thin hope
of those whose dreams
are all they have left?
Is all that oppression not enough —
must you want me
to go raise a marble palace by the sea,
must you snuff out
the last dim flame
from all those babies
who have not even cried?