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Poetry lamenting war #2
Mar. 21st, 2003 07:05 am"You and I Are Disappearing"--Bjorn Hakansson
The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head. At daybreak
she burns like a piece of paper.
She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.
We stand with our hands
hanging at our sides,
while she burns
like a sack of dry ice.
She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker's cigar,
silent as quicksilver.
A tiger under a rainbow
at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rain forest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind.
--Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1988.
LINKS
biography from the Academy of American Poets.
The Modern American Poetry site (a companion, it tells me, to Oxford's Anthology of Modern American Poetry (2000)) has a page with secondary reading: an essay, interviews with Komunyakaa, historical background about the Vietnam War, etc.
[Technical note: merci millefois a![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sbisson, who figured out how to get blank spaces at the start of the lines: check out the Burning Baby Fish for details.]
The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head. At daybreak
she burns like a piece of paper.
She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.
We stand with our hands
hanging at our sides,
while she burns
like a sack of dry ice.
She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker's cigar,
silent as quicksilver.
A tiger under a rainbow
at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rain forest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind.
--Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1988.
LINKS
biography from the Academy of American Poets.
The Modern American Poetry site (a companion, it tells me, to Oxford's Anthology of Modern American Poetry (2000)) has a page with secondary reading: an essay, interviews with Komunyakaa, historical background about the Vietnam War, etc.
[Technical note: merci millefois a
sbisson, who figured out how to get blank spaces at the start of the lines: check out the Burning Baby Fish for details.]
