At break of day I feel as if I'm clasping a bouquet of smiling flowers
But the wind of time does not cease blowing
And the hours wilt like falling petals.

As quoted in "Shattered Identities and Contested Images: Reflections of Poetry and History in 20th-Century Vietnam" by Neil Jamieson, in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1992, p. 86