Yusef Komunyakaa

I'm quite excited to be seeing one of my favorite living poets tonight, Yusef Komunyakaa, at the Penn State spiritual center. If you get a chance, pick up the collection Dien Cai Dau, the majority of which deals with his time spent as a Vietnam journalist. But these are much more than war poems.




Here's one of my favorites called "You and I are Disappearing." Here you can access more online Komunyakaa along with RealMedia readings.

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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.