Poem of the Week: Sam Hamill

True Peace  

Half broken on that smoky night, 

hunched over sake in a serviceman's dive 

somewhere in Naha, Okinawa, 

nearly fifty years ago, 

 

I read of the Saigon Buddhist monks 

who stopped the traffic on a downtown 

thoroughfare 

so their master, Thich Quang Dúc, could take up 

the lotus posture in the middle of the street. 

And they baptized him there with gas 

and kerosene, and he struck a match 

and burst into flame. 

 

That was June, nineteen-sixty-three, 

and I was twenty, a U.S. Marine. 

 

The master did not move, did not squirm, 

he did not scream 

in pain as his body was consumed. 

 

Neither child nor yet a man, 

I wondered to my Okinawan friend, 

what can it possibly mean 

to make such a sacrifice, to give one's life 

with such horror, but with dignity and conviction. 

How can any man endure such pain 

and never cry and never blink. 

 

And my friend said simply, "Thich Quang Dúc 

had achieved true peace." 

 

And I knew that night true peace 

for me would never come. 

Not for me, Nirvana. This suffering world 

is mine, mine to suffer in its grief. 

 

Half a century later, I think 

of Bô Tát Thich Quang Dúc, 

revered as a bodhisattva now--his lifetime 

building temples, teaching peace, 

and of his death and the statement that it made. 

 

Like Shelley's, his heart refused to burn, 

even when they burned his ashes once again 

in the crematorium--his generous heart 

turned magically to stone. 

 

What is true peace, I cannot know. 

A hundred wars have come and gone 

as I've grown old. I bear their burdens in my bones. 

Mine's the heart that burns 

today, mine the thirst, the hunger in the soul. 

 

Old master, old teacher,

what is it that I've learned?

-From Border Songs (Word Palace Press, 2012) 

 

Used by permission. 

 

Sam Hamill is the author of more than forty books, including fifteen volumes of original poetry, most recently Border Songs (Word Palace Press, 2012); four collections of literary essays; and translations of ancient Chinese and Japanese classics. He co-founded, and for 32 years was editor at, Copper Canyon Press. An outspoken political pacifist, in 2003, declining an invitation to the White House, he founded Poets Against War, compiling the largest single-themed poetry anthology in history, 30,000 poems by 26,000 poets.

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