Day 2: You And I Are Disappearing

Today's poem was suggested to me by a friend and as I was reading it I noticed that I was trying to find out what this girl meant, what the burning meant. Thinking deeply about poems is good but it felt like I was analyzing it too much. Poetry, from what I've read in my life, seems to be more about the feelings that the author is trying to give/show the reader than what is on the page. 


You And I Are Disappearing 
by Yusef Komunyakaa


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.

I very much enjoyed the repetition of "she burns" because it becomes clear that the narrator is seeing this, trying to analyze what this other worldly thing is by comparing it to things they know. My favorite line is "she glows like the fat tip of a banker's cigar", mostly because it's a very clear image I get from it. It's a very good poem by a very interesting poet. I was looking up information about his writing and it looks like some of his inspirations come from the time period before the Civil Rights movement here in the United States and I can completely see how this poem relates to that and the awful acts done by white supremacy groups. 

Well, if you have any thoughts about this poem you want to share please share them in the comments. I would really like this to be a more two way conversation because poetry is very different for every person who reads it. The way I read it isn't the only way to understand this poem. Tell me what you think about today's poem down below...