Some Are Lost In the Fire, Others Are Built From It

By Basia Diagne

The Burning Monk

Vietnam, 1963

Photographed by Malcolme Browne

I woke up with a morphine hangover,

tiny brown body wrapped in white gauze.

skin burnt and mangled,

all shea butter soft with no shine.

The hospital reeked of charred flesh and despair

the kind bleach can’t kill,

the kind even the blaze wished it could.

they told me not to touch the fire,

so instead I swallowed it.

let it lick my skin till we became one,

made death watch as we partied on

turned those godly flames into scars,

& let the smoke sing it’s song.

some are lost in the fire

but baby, I rose from it

had them thinking it was self-immolation

when all along

it was self-birth.

Short Description of Poem & Background:

At 9 years old I was involved in a terrible burn accident. I wouldn’t wish that kind of suffering on my worst enemy.

While this event quite literally burned me and left me scarred, it also fundamentally transformed me, the way I move through this life, the stories my body tells and the lens that I now look at the world through.

I began to understand that reconstruction sometimes requires destruction, perhaps even annihilation, of the person we thought we were, of our egos, of how we feel in our bodies, of our beliefs, of how we once looked at the world.

This poem is about embracing the pain, the fear, the chaos and the destruction that inevitably comes with change, on both the individual scale and the collective scale. It is how we approach that which can destroy us that we ignite within us what will ultimately make us resilient.

---