Hadaa Sendoo (1961) is a poet and translator of international renown. He has lived in Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia since 1991. He has won awards for poetry in India, the USA, Canada, Greece, China, and Russia, including the Mongolian Writers’ Union Prize. Since 1989, he has published 15 books of poetry. Sendoo Hadaa’s influence transcends national and ethnic borders and he is recognized as a great poet of the 21th century. In 2006, he founded the ground-breaking World Poetry Almanac, which he continues to edit. From 1998, he is a member of the Mongolian Writers Union.
100 million light years of a dream
I know I myself
Will have turned a page
I will stay in place
And the body will
Officially bid farewell to the soul
Then go back to the grass
The world has suffered too much, like me
but I wish you’ll meet a good man
And believe that love can always warm
The cold on earth
If you sing out sounds, they should be like Mongolian folk songs
Sadness without weeping.
And my epitaph, it’s destined to remain in my lines of poetry
Hypocritical inscription; it, too, cannot be compared with a few lines of tears
Of the wanderer who returns home
In the years of sorrow afterwards
I will still stand as a tree in the wind
If night is filled with lightning, thought is such as the house of God
If freedom is bread, a poem is as pure honey
Rewriting It
With a broken tip of the pen
my tears
write grief in July
And years, like dust raised by horseshoes
no matter whether I live or commit suicide
are all like a flaw that becomes a poem
Today, I rewrite it
For this drop of blood on my finger
and the world's trembling ink
are like the morning dew –
a condensation of my luck
Daybreak
At daybreak, when you came
Dewdrops were birthing too
The paling sky brought forth quivering life
I wait for my war horse, he’s bolted
I’m left walking barefoot
Through the towering stillness of the night
Comments