Thom Gunn wrote of the poet Josephine Miles (1911–1985) that “the unavoidable first fact about [her] was physical. As a young child she contracted a form of degenerative arthritis so severe that it left her limbs deformed and crippled. As a result, she could not be left alone in a house, she could not handle a mug . . . she could not use a typewriter; and she could neither walk nor operate a wheel.” Some other facts are equally pertinent: she was the first woman to receive tenure in the English department at Berkeley, she wrote a dozen books of poetry, and she mentored many younger writers, including William Stafford in the present anthology.
“Necessities (1)” is Miles’s account of one of the iconic actions of the Vietnam War, namely, the self-immolations performed by Vietnamese Buddhists to protest the injustices inflicted on the Vietnamese by the war. Unlike Yusef Komunyakaa’s “2527th Birthday of the Buddha”—a poem on the same subject included later in this book—Miles focuses on the embarrassed, cautious response of her interlocutor, who feels that such action is unnecessary, wasteful, a shame. Miles is more sympathetic to the need for self-sacrifice: while “voices are voiceless,” the Buddhists’ self-sacrificial fires have spoken as eloquently as the tongues of the Apostles in the story of Pentecost.
He says the Buddhist immolations
Are unnecessary.
He says a flambeau
Supplies no needed way for one to die.
Too bad
These wasteful people
Depart this tasteful earth so wastefully.
But while the ears
Along his worrying kindly handsome head
Along his troubled head
Are closed,
Voices are voiceless, and the visible flames
Of flesh dart out their tongues,
Voluble, necessary.