poetry notebook

How old were you that year, Rhosonny? Nine?

He can never remember what year he was at what age

or what grade or for certain in which state he lived.

But he remembers 1963 better than almost any other year,

though he hasn’t always remembered that it was 1963

when he thought of this or that event.

Was he in Alabama that year? Or was it the next?

In any case, he was a news junkie already:

Cronkite, U.S. News and World Report,

newspapers wherever he found one,

[George Wallace in the door saying

"segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!"

the next day Medger Evers murdered;

Gideon vs. Wainwright, Abington School District v. Schempp

but if you go to Cuba, you're not American anymore;

Dr. King's letter from Birmingham Jail and his Dream;

the Beatles and diet cola, Bob Dylan Freewheeling

through the Feminine Mystique and suffrage for women

is established in Iran, and even in Detroit

Malcolm X gives a speech while in Viet

Nam Buddhist monks are beaten and shot by troops under order

from the Roman Catholic U.S. puppet Diem, himself

taken out by the CIA (but not the new

Domestic Operations Division); Mecury 9

was the last of its type, and the first geostationary

satellite to verify a nuclear test ban treaty went up

though William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Sylvia Plath,

Theodore Roethke, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Louis MacNeice,

Ellmore James and Edith Hamilton,

Georges Braque, Jean Cocteau, and Edith Piaf,

Dinah Washington, Tristan Tzara, Paul Hindemuth,

Sonny Clark and Fritz Reiner,

László Lajtha, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley

and so many others, too many to mention,

left us without the push of an assassin

unlike John F. Kennedy and one of the six

who tried to take out de Gaulle,

Lee Harvey Oswald, and Lee Quang Tung

and so many others both known and unknown,

especially in Viet Nam and the deep south

like Eugene Connor and his dogs and hoses

and maybe Jakarta over Malaysia, but somehow

not the same though in Africa things were very bad

so The Organisation of African Unity and finally

though Dorothy Nyembe goes to jail

the U.N. at least calls for a voluntary

arms embargo of South Africa, not much,

but finally...]

Yet the one thing in this maelstrom to which

he was privy as a child, that also includes

his neighbors, sharecroppers living in shacks

who went to a different school

and weren’t allowed to play with him

though Bertha babysat often, whom the kids loved

but from whom they were separated by race

and the pictures of men hanging from bridges

and the sign on the new segment of Interstate

very slowly manifesting on the other side of the barn,

“Gov. George Wallace is Building this Highway for You!”

with his picture smiling down on their poverty

so deep they didn’t know how to dial a phone,

and his family’s relative wealth

and crosses burning and the letters KKK

very present at every turn, at every sign

that said “colored” or “white” so that

even taking out the garbage at night,

knowing that he was white,

feared the KKK because they were evil

and the old man across the street

who’s parents had both been slaves

was the person who treated him with more

kindness than anyone else he ever met

in Alabama.

And yet, there was one thing,

one act, which he only witnessed in pictures,

that changed his feelings about power,

its relationship to terrorism and militarism,

forever. At most every other turn,

Dr. King the most notable exception,

power was defined as the ability to maim,

destroy, and kill. There were frequent parades,

a parade always celebrating military might

in some way. Heroes were defined as soldiers.

Bravery, heroism, and power were fused

together into a single dominant concept.

But then, one night on television,

a young man sat down on the street

while another poured gasoline over him.

Once the other was clear

lit a match and went up in flames.

And didn’t wince. Or writhe.

And didn’t change expression

while he liquefied before Rhosonny’s eyes.

This he recognized as power, though he’d

seen many rockets launch. This he saw

as bravery, though he saw that there was bravery

all around him. This man was his hero.

Of course, everybody else said the man was crazy

or stupid. Some went so far as to attempt

to establish this act as proof that pacificism

was merely a method of getting trampled on

by those more powerful than you.

But Rhossony was never able to accept

the power of weapons as being greater

or more meaningful, even in the hands

of an army, than the absolute power

displayed by this single monk

one day in the summer

in Saigon.