Childhood’s End –
11 June 1963, the Death of Thich Quang Duc, Saigon
The first evening I was ever left alone
without a sitter, eleven, sensible enough,
for my parents to sortie out to their play-reading group,
the house slopped, a loose space around me, felt odd
as my mother’s too-large slippers on my child-feet.
I watched a film about a breaking dam
that drowned a town in India: The Rains Came,
then sought the comforting voice of the evening news;
but there, like a razor drawn across my eyes
came the image of a burning man, a monk
cross-legged beside a back road in Saigon,
a gas-can beside him, and for a time-stopped age
he was monstrously swaying in his prayer of flame.
And neither could I breathe, frozen in witness
at the ultimacy of that protest, that wordless scream.
Then I watched at the darkened window for an hour
for our car to trundle the safe world up our drive
and back into its order, but I was stung
there by a hornet hidden in the curtain.
without a sitter, eleven, sensible enough,
for my parents to sortie out to their play-reading group,
the house slopped, a loose space around me, felt odd
as my mother’s too-large slippers on my child-feet.
I watched a film about a breaking dam
that drowned a town in India: The Rains Came,
then sought the comforting voice of the evening news;
but there, like a razor drawn across my eyes
came the image of a burning man, a monk
cross-legged beside a back road in Saigon,
a gas-can beside him, and for a time-stopped age
he was monstrously swaying in his prayer of flame.
And neither could I breathe, frozen in witness
at the ultimacy of that protest, that wordless scream.
Then I watched at the darkened window for an hour
for our car to trundle the safe world up our drive
and back into its order, but I was stung
there by a hornet hidden in the curtain.
About the Author
Jennifer M Phillips is a bi-national immigrant, painter, Bonsai-grower. Her chapbooks are Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022. With work in over 90 journals, she is currently a Pushcart Poetry Prize nominee.