A star
on a street in Saigon
Extinguishes
the last of its light.
Half a century later,
I study a monk’s passing
From the pages
of Time Magazine.
This is how I learn
of my history:
Named and dressed
in grays of pain,
the gaze of a foreigner.
Those glossy facsimiles—
picturesque almost—
Persist through
every refusal to look.
His face tendering
a skeletal expression;
Neither living
nor dead
Only amongst smoke
and a sea of fire
Does the monk surrender
to the blaze like
a final sacred habit.
Disciples
fixate on the bright dispute,
Luminance,
shedding life like dead skin,
Caressing
each bead,
Fingering through
the same prayer
My mother taught me
to sleep at night:
Nam mô
A di
đà Phật
Nam mô
A di
đà Phật
Nam mô
A di
đà Phật
Nam mô
A di
đà Phật
Nam mô
A di
đà Phật
Nam mô
A di
đà Phật
Nam mô
A di
đà Phật
The lure
of the photograph
Frames the act
into an ashen landscape of fire;
A surreal spectacle
worthy of acclaim.
While the photographer,
a white American man,
Wins a Pulitzer Prize for
the monk’s martyrdom:
“I just kept shooting,
and shooting,
and shooting.”
We are all made
into bystanders;
I must have stared for
as long as it took for him to die.
The violence of watching
this grave veneration,
The monk lulled into composure,
even in death;
A lotus,
unwavering to our laments,
And his eyes
surely clasped
like prayer hands:
Nam mô
A di
đà
Phật
Nam mô
A di
đà Phật
Nam mô
A di
đà Phật
Nam mô
A di
đà Phật
Nam mô
A
di
đà Phật
Nam mô
A di
đà
Phật