How do we, as Americans, react to photographs of children our bombs have hurt or killed? Here are two poems about images of children caught in the horror of war. The first is a response to the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Kim Phuc, burned by napalm as she and her family run to escape the bombing of Trang Bang, Vietnam, in 1972. The second poem may be a response to the same image. More here.
Too Hot,
Too Hot
by Lisa Mullenneaux
We couldn’t play the
dragon snake
We couldn’t go outside the
temple
while the fat planes flew
so we played
spinning tops, told each
other stories
of what we’d do when the
fighting stopped.
Run, soldiers shouted, the
temple’s burning.
Trang Bang was burning, I
was burning,
orange flames licking my
bare arms,
licking away my cotton
shirt, my shorts
and underpants until I was
nothing
but a mouth screaming “Too
hot, too hot,”
trying to outrun the
dragon.
I lived. The doctors told
my father “no,”
but I lived. Every minute
in pain. When they
removed dead skin in the
burn bath,
my childhood washed away.
Something else
grew with the new cells
grafted to my back.
Fame grew. I was “the
Napalm Girl,”
image without a name. Can
I tell my story?
There was once a village,
there was once a girl.
War Photograph
by Kate Daniels
A naked child is running
along the path toward us,
her arms stretched out,
her mouth open, the world turned to trash
behind her.
She is running from the smoke
and the soldiers, from the bodies
of her mother and little sister
thrown down into a ditch,
from the blown-up bamboo hut
from the melted pots and pans.
And she is also running from the gods
who have changed the sky to fire
and puddled the earth with skin and blood.
She is running--my god--to us,
10,000 miles away,
reading the caption
beneath her picture
in a weekly magazine.
All over the country
we're feeling sorry for her
and being appalled at the war
being fought in the other world.
She keeps on running, you know,
after the shutter of the camera
clicks. She's running to us.
For how can she know,
her feet beating a path
on another continent?
How can she know
what we really are?
From the distance, we look
so terribly human.
ekphrastic poems painters poets