Ocean Vuong

     Aubade with Burning City

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.

            Milkflower petals on the street

                                                     like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright ...

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.

            Open, he says.

                                        She opens.

                                                      Outside, a soldier spits out

            his cigarette as footsteps

                            fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all

                                         your Christmases be white as the traffic guard

            unstraps his holster.

                                        His hand running the hem

of  her white dress.

                            His black eyes.

            Her black hair.

                            A single candle.

                                        Their shadows: two wicks.

A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children

                                        shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled

            through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog

                            lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs

                                                                                   crushed into the shine

                                                       of a white Christmas.

On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard

                                                                      for the first time.

The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police

                                facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.

                                             A palm-sized photo of his father soaking

                beside his left ear.

The song moving through the city like a widow.

                A white ...    A white ...    I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow

                                                          falling from her shoulders.

Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded

                                           with gunfire. Red sky.

                              Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.

A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.

            The city so white it is ready for ink.

                                                     The radio saying run run run.

Milkflower petals on a black dog

                            like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright. She is saying

            something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks

                        beneath them. The bed a field of ice

                                                                                 cracking.

Don’t worry, he says, as the first bomb brightens

                             their faces, my brothers have won the war

                                                                       and tomorrow ...    

                                             The lights go out.

I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ...    

                                                            to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...    

In the square below: a nun, on fire,

                                            runs silently toward her god — 

                           Open, he says.

                                                         She opens.

Sharon Olds

Leningrad Cemetery, Winter of 1941

That winter, the dead could not be buried.
The ground was frozen, the gravediggers weak from hunger,
the coffin wood used for fuel. So they were covered with
something
and taken on a child’s sled to a cemetery
in the sub-zero air. They lay on the soil,
some of them wrapped in dark cloth
bound with rope like the tree’s ball of roots
when it waits to be planted; others wound in sheets,
their pale, gauze, tapered shapes
stiff as cocoons that will split down the center
when the new life inside is prepared;
but most lay like corpses, their coverings
coming undone, naked calves
hard as corded wood spilling
from under a cloak, a hand reaching out
with no sign of peace, wanting to come back
even to the bread made of glue and sawdust,
even to the icy winter and the siege.

Edwin Muir

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs, no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, headed north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters crouched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.