♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Major support for "Poetry in America" provided by the Dalio Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of "Poetry" magazine, and an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

And from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.

♪ ♪ (people talking in background, insects chirping) LEO FARLEY: There was always, like, smoke or something going on, whether it was coming from the base or whether it was coming from outside.

♪ ♪ JOHN KERRY: There was this quiet calm, which you actually could see sometimes.

I mean, there'd be this haze at night from the wood fires.

♪ ♪ DAVID SANDGRUND: There were cook fires in the houses in the village, and so you could smell dinner, or breakfast, or lunch-- whatever was being made.

♪ ♪ (rooster crowing) (insects chirping) KERRY: They were living while we were trying to move them out.

♪ ♪ WESTLEY THOMAS: I see napalm being dropped.

KERRY: I don't think there's anybody who was involved in operations that didn't see napalm dropped at one point or another.

♪ ♪ SANDGRUND: Now you're smelling burning flesh, different kinds of buildings made with different materials.

ROGER HARRIS: Napalm is dropped to kill and burn people.

Napalm is dropped deliberately to burn people.

♪ ♪ THOMAS: As the years have gone by-- we're talking about decades-- it's etched within me, and it's, it's a, it's haunting.

♪ ♪ JULIE TAYMOR: How do you take the godawful experiences and nightmares and dreams, and put them on to paper?

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: "You and I Are Disappearing."

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.

(wind howling) NEW: I first encountered this poem when I asked Julie Taymor, celebrated director of theater, opera, and film, to read and discuss any poem of her choice.

She suggested "You and I Are Disappearing" by poet and Vietnam veteran Yusef Komunyakaa.

And so I invited Komunyakaa to talk about his poem with me, along with other veterans of the war, including former Secretary of State John Kerry.

I also spoke to composer Elliot Goldenthal, who had made Komunyakaa's poem central to the oratorio he wrote to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the war.

MAN: ♪ The cry I bring down ♪ ♪ From the hills ♪ GOLDENTHAL: It was the easiest poem that I ever set to music.

MAN: ♪ To a girl ♪ Because it felt so right in, in each gesture.

It wanted to be music.

MAN: ♪ Inside my head ♪ NEW: In 1969, Komunyakaa went to Vietnam as an information specialist, a journalist, and then editor for the military newsletter the "Southern Cross."

"The cry I bring down from the hills" is almost like reporting a journalistic soldier's account.

At the same time, saying, "I'm seeing something that is impossible to describe."

He's trying to take the unsensible and make it sensible.

♪ ♪ KOMUNYAKAA: I was reading poetry in Vietnam, but I never thought I would write poetry.

I thought I would write essays, but there's something about the lyrical... intent in each of the poems I was reading that sort of linked me to what was happening around me and to me.

♪ ♪ I wonder if I would have become a poet without Vietnam.

♪ ♪ KERRY: "The cry I bring down from the hills belongs to a girl still burning inside my head."

He's still trying to hold on to the whole image of the girl.

She's still in his head.

You know, she's still in his head.

It begins with the girl, but it becomes more than the girl.

It becomes the whole territory.

♪ ♪ KERRY: A lot of people who were in Vietnam and who fought there came away with a profound sense of the beauty of the place.

I mean, it was really beautiful.

♪ ♪ THOMAS: The greenery is green.

It's, like, emerald-green.

KERRY: Down near Cambodia, you have these huge limestone hills.

And in the North, near Hanoi, you can see these jagged green semi-mountains, just stuck there.

From the air, it's gorgeous.

♪ ♪ KOMUNYAKAA: Writing the poem took me back to Louisiana.

♪ ♪ The weather, the intensity of the heat, the vegetation, reminded me of Vietnam.

SANDGRUND: "She burns like a cattail torch dipped in gasoline."

♪ ♪ NEW: Yusef Komunyakaa came of age in Bogalusa, Louisiana.

His access to books was limited to the Bible at home and what he could borrow from the segregated local library.

Bogalusa was not only segregated, it was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and it had a long history of racial violence.

KOMUNYAKAA: Being a boy growing up in Louisiana, taking dried cattails dipped in gasoline, and it's a little torch.

GOLDENTHAL: I thought of a childhood of possibly sugarcane and fields that has a kind of halcyon beauty to it.

KOMUNYAKAA: I don't know if it's nightmarish.

There's also a kind of brightness to it.

A beauty?

A treacherous.

(chuckling): Beauty.

For a moment, it's a beautiful image.

Then it's an image of horror, atrocity, abuse.

Cattail... Also, cat-o'-nine-tails.

NEW: Yes, yes.

- There's all the other sounds that we get in our memory.

- The history of lynching.

- Lynching, with the torch.

- For a Southern poet from Louisiana.

- Absolutely.

♪ ♪ NEW: If you ask people, "What are the images you have of Vietnam?

", most of them will say, "Burning."

Yeah, yeah.

NEW: Not only burning in Vietnam, but we think of the country burning.

(man shouting) People are burning draft cards.

People are setting themselves on fire.

GOLDENTHAL: There was a period in Vietnam where a lot of monks were burning themselves.

One woman had a picture of Guanyin, a goddess of mercy, and, uh, you know, the Madonna on her other side.

And then she lit herself afire.

♪ ♪ NEW: One way this poet addresses the problem of writing about experiences so terrible is that the images, in a way, just go up.

They combust.

TAYMOR: In flame.

FARLEY: "She burns like oil on water.

She burns like a cattail torch dipped in gasoline."

She burns like this, she burns like that.

I mean, the burning is just indelibly pounded into you, but it's accompanied by a different set of possibilities about what that burning is like, or what it means and what it means to him.

It is a painting of abstractions, of images of abstractions.

♪ ♪ It's all the different ways in the speaker's psyche the burning is taking place, the density of it.

♪ ♪ NEW: This is a poem based on a set of similes.

- Yes, yes.

- "This is like that."

What's the power for you, as a poet, of a simile?

KOMUNYAKAA: The simile is subversive.

When the images converge, there's a kind of confrontation.

NEW: Komunyakaa's similes go well beyond mere comparison of this to that, rather setting off subversive and disturbing chains of association.

"A thigh-shaped valley" and "a skirt of flames" are images that trespass comfortable boundaries.

And many of the other similes for fire have a similarly dangerous allure, mingling innocence and guilt.

"She burns like a sack of dry ice."

That's chemical.

But also we think about napalm-- that's chemical, as well.

And it seems artificial.

But they're all the natural ways of seeing and experiencing the burning sensation, as well.

♪ ♪ NEW: The similes of this poem make it hard to tell natural from unnatural, beauty from poison.

The glow of bioluminescent foxfire in a dying tree mimics the rainbow effect of oil on water.

And the rainbow's brilliant disappearing stripes are paralleled in quicksilver-- the liquid metal mercury, whose beauty is toxic.

♪ ♪ GOLDENTHAL: "She burns like a sack of dry ice."

That imagery of putting dead bodies on dry ice and being shipped back to the United States.

SANDGRUND: "She burns like a sack of dry ice."

He later uses a similar kind of image where he says, "She burns like a shot glass of vodka."

So he's not really talking about fire in either of those cases.

But he's talking about something that feels like fire, but isn't really.

How does a sack of dry ice burn, really?

Well, first of all, it burns to the touch, but it disappears, too.

♪ ♪ That's like a piece of paper-- burning like a piece of paper.

Well, a piece of paper curls up and becomes nothing-- just disappears.

♪ ♪ FARLEY: A burning piece of paper just flittering away, just, like, going in ash, just kind of evaporates.

The title of this poem is really important.

"You and I Are Disappearing."

We're disappearing.

The physical component of the burning, as well as the spiritual part of the burning.

♪ ♪ HARRIS: "We stand with our hands hanging at our sides, while she burns like a sack of dry ice."

The atrocities of war is something that Americans have been sheltered from.

You know, and when you witness that stuff, you try to make sense of it.

And initially, it doesn't make... Like, when I first got there, it didn't make sense.

What I was seeing didn't make sense.

And then after a while, you... You adapt and you adjust, and the craziness becomes normal.

♪ ♪ FARLEY: What really stuck out to me was the hands at their sides.

You know, "We stood there with our hands at our sides and just watched."

♪ ♪ KERRY: Impotence was a feeling a lot of people had, you know.

You're sort of stuck.

TAYMOR: "We stand with our hands hanging at our side."

Completely incapable.

Where there's a, um, a violence of passivity that shocks us.

♪ ♪ KOMUNYAKAA: Standing there, seeing what's happening, and not really being human enough to feel the pain.

♪ ♪ FARLEY: "She glows like the fat tip of a banker's cigar, silent as quicksilver."

"The fat tip of a banker's cigar, silent as quicksilver."

It's the money.

Then you start to get the capitalism, you know.

You get the image of, well, who's actually responsible at the source of this image?

SANDGRUND: It describes who's controlling why and how we go to war.

It's not the people that are fighting.

It's rarely the generals.

I remember actually thinking-- we were being shot at once, and we were hunkered down in mud.

I said to myself, you know, "Does anybody at home really care about what we're doing here?"

And that's the banker.

That's the guy smoking his cigar, fat tip.

♪ ♪ TAYMOR: "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."

KERRY: "She rises like dragonsmoke to my nostrils."

Well, I assume he's talking about heroin.

FARLEY: There was a lot of drugs.

I was on guard duty with a guy one time, he was just nodding out from smoking heroin, like, on the next sandbag over from me.

You know, I wanted to throw him out of the guard tower.

THOMAS: You wonder why your sandbags are smoldering.

(chuckles) Because somebody was in your bunker smoking marijuana and they didn't put out their, their joint or their cigarette.

♪ ♪ SANDGRUND: "She burns like a shot glass of vodka."

FARLEY: You know, it was a lot to deal with.

People poured alcohol on it.

And anything else you could do to just kind of, like, check out, you know?

MAN: ♪ Burns like a shot glass of vodka ♪ GOLDENTHAL: ♪ Shot glass of vodka ♪ You know, all the vowels inherit, and then lulling yourself, lulling yourself.

It almost is a junkie's reaction to pain.

These addictive substances, I think, say something, as well, about the addictiveness of war... ♪ ♪ Or satisfy some human need for spectacle, for fire.

We can burn the world up.

- With a shot glass of vodka.

You know... (imitates drinking) that quick... - Consumption.

- Consumption.

(exhales) ♪ ♪ HARRIS: Folks, when napalm is dropped on them, they glow.

They glow, they burn orange.

♪ ♪ MAN: ♪ She rises like dragonsmoke ♪ (orchestra plays) TAYMOR: "She rises like dragonsmoke to my nostrils."

We all have different associations with these images.

The dragonsmoke comes out normally, you know, you blow it out.

In this one, "She rises like dragonsmoke to my nostrils," which means that he's inhaling her.

Yes.

So her body is now...

He's consuming her.

♪ ♪ NEW: What do you think about the word "girl" in the poem?

This girl's not a teenager.

She's a child.

The females that were soldiers were women, they weren't girls.

You know, and I think if this was...

If it was a guy, it wouldn't bother him so much.

You know, this is, like, this is, this is...

This is an atrocity of innocence.

♪ ♪ KERRY: Of course, the image that leapt out at me as I read the poem was that searing, iconic photograph of the young girl running down the street.

♪ ♪ TAYMOR: It feels like he keeps trying to define this image of the girl.

And some of the images are sexual.

That beautiful one about "the thigh-shaped valley," "a skirt of flames."

♪ ♪ KERRY: A "thigh-shaped valley," and a "skirt of flames," and you suddenly are thinking, "Wait, there's a little eroticism in that."

♪ ♪ GOLDENTHAL: I couldn't help but hear blues.

A type of blues that was kind of a little, uh, sexy, you know.

♪ ♪ NEW: Images like this, or the fat tip of that cigar, seem to treat war as a kind of rape.

♪ ♪ KOMUNYAKAA: I think that's the poet's role.

We have to see with a certain kind of daring intensity.

♪ ♪ FARLEY: "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."

It's a litany, it has this litany going on, you know.

All those repetitive "she burns."

She burns like this, she burns like that.

Like something in church.

And that "burning bush" is... That's, if that's not right out of church, I don't know what is.

(chuckles) ♪ ♪ TAYMOR: A burning bush everybody know is the signal... NEW: Moses.

- Of Moses and, and a sign.

The burning bush didn't disappear.

It just kept burning.

NEW: So there is a revelation.

KOMUNYAKAA: There's a revelation in the psyche of the speaker.

And, and maybe that's why the poem exists.

♪ ♪ NEW: The last two lines of the poem-- "She burns like a burning bush, driven by a godawful wind"-- what do those lines say to you?

- And he doesn't capitalize "God" in godawful.

"Godawful" is a very, very everyday colloquialism.

"Oh, that's godawful, isn't it?"

It doesn't hardly carry any weight until you put it in the context of the whole poem.

♪ ♪ SANDGRUND: When you're dropping napalm, when the fire ignites, it creates this unbelievable wind.

♪ ♪ THOMAS: You can also feel the heat from the exploding and the backblast, and then you can also hear the roar.

♪ ♪ KERRY: "Driven by a godawful wind."

"Godawful" is very powerful there.

It's the summary of how horrible the war is and how terrible the things that are happening are.

♪ ♪ TAYMOR: The first words are "the cry."

And the last is "godawful wind."

So the cry of a girl transforms into the sound of a crying wind.

MAN: ♪ She burns like a burning bush ♪ Driven like a god... aw... ful... wind... MAN: ♪ Driven by ♪ ♪ A godawful wind ♪ (orchestra playing) And the last note.

♪ Wind ♪ Is the lowest note of the piece.

(orchestra playing) It's very, very self-contained, damnifying.

(orchestra playing) KOMUNYAKAA: It took me back to biblical texts, but also almost medieval.

Images of Hell.

- Yeah.

♪ ♪ SANDGRUND: I'm sure that there are soldiers on any side of any war who cannot get that burning out of their head.

♪ ♪ HARRIS: Most young guys that spent time in Vietnam as infantrymen and survived came home with a different understanding than they had when they went over.

And they came back with a feeling of almost like feeling lost.

♪ ♪ KOMUNYAKAA: When I wrote the poem, it was just in a single sitting.

I just wrote it.

It was almost as if I had written it already in my psyche.

♪ ♪ THOMAS: What he wrote is based on experience.

And anybody that reads it, if they have a compassionate heart, it becomes alive.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Major support for "Poetry in America" provided by the Dalio Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of "Poetry" magazine, and an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

And from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.

For additional information and streaming content, please visit us at poetryinamerica.org.