Aubade with Burning City

The poem captures the fundamental strangeness of several sensory experiences happening in one moment in Saigon: a Christmas song plays on the radio in April; tanks crush the city walls; shells explode; people and dogs run in the street; lovers drink champagne; Americans and their allies evacuate via helicopter; living beings suffer. Vuong incorporates lyrics from "White Christmas" into his poem to capture the irony of the moment. In some places, the song lyrics exist alongside the action on separate lines: “May your days be merry and bright… // He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips. / Open, he says. / She opens” (Lines 3-6). Here, the strangeness lies in the contrast between lines. In other places in the poem, the boundary between holiday song and war blur as the two become part of one sentence: “May all / your Christmases be white as the traffic guard / unstraps his holster” (Lines 9-11). In this way, the Christmas song and the brutality of the moment become one thing.

The poem also expresses strangeness and absurdity of the Fall of Saigon with an irregular form and intentional use of white space. There is no pattern to the indentation, the line breaks, or the stanza breaks.