HOPEWARD BOUND

A while back my brother-in-law asked if I wanted to collaborate with him in putting on a poetry event here in Wilmington. Yes, I said, before he proposed hope as a theme. 

Hope, of course, forms the basis of all my writing. Just kidding.

Early on, as a poet in college, I wrote a poem mocking Wendell Berry's "The Peace of Wild Things." It was a scathing lampoon, and accomplished too. One day I'll dig it up and post it here. Earlier, in high school, I wrote of tortured love, depression, the impossibility of closeness or connection. Earlier still, in grade school, I penned story after story of human cruelty toward other animals. You could say hope was my essence, my obsession, my brand. If you were an idiot.

So as the day of the event draws near, I've been turning my attention hopeward. I remember being in a meeting of Unitarians where the leader eloquently made clear that hope, not optimism, was the thing. I wish I could recall her exact words, but her conclusion, if not her rationale, has stuck with me. I've always had hope, I know. I would not still be alive if I didn't. But I've never thought to explore or emphasize it in my poetry, until now. With just over a month till the event, I'll be seeing what happens when I adjust my poetic lens to put hope in focus and let the rest go blurry. Here's what happened this morning:


FIVE GRAINS

One day I went looking for hope
enough to leaven a poem
the way yeast leavens powder into bread

knowing I wouldn’t find it in any store
I walked past all the markets
knowing I wouldn’t find it on a road
I left behind asphalt and macadam 
and the dead epaulets clasped to their shoulders

did you know there are roads almost everywhere
did you know I have heard the sound of machinery
every day of my life

I took myself as far as I could go
not very far
just a shady patch of earth
where it was easier not to see 
vehicles crisscrossing the sky

I watched the sweat bees drink
their fill from my salty skin
and that was one grain of yeast
I swam in the drying wind
and that was another

and when a squirrel scolded me for staying too long I left
wondering if my species
was the world’s unwanted guest

then I saw a family in a dusty sedan
stopping to let a turtle cross their path
and their patience was one more grain
and their wide eyes taking in the turtle made two
and the turtle herself 
sticking her neck out into a future 
not even the blind could see 
was a third

and then I had enough grains
for this poem to rise
enough hope to keep plodding
my way through the world

where you also are
and you
and you
and you. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poem in Appalachian Review

Image
  A slim package came yesterday in the mail. The Spring 2020 issue of Appalachian Review , which includes my poem "Almost Heaven, or Mixed-Race Roadtrip Following the Fall of Saigon." Past contributors to Appalachian Review include Pinckney Benedict, Wendell Berry, Wiley Cash, Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks, Silas House, Fenton Johnson, Barbara Kingsolver, Maurice Manning, Ann Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Neela Vaswani, Frank X Walker, Crystal Wilkinson, etc. etc., so I feel I'm in excellent company.  The journal used to be called Appalachian Heritage , a name that too many people, according to its website, associated with "a simplistic view of Appalachia as a place frozen in a quaint, bucolic, homogenous past or, at worst, a particular ultra-conservative brand of politics and identity." Hence, the name change.  It's a shame that the word "heritage" has come to carry so much ugly baggage. But it's w...
Read more

The Story Silence Tells

Image
Last week I participated in  Southern Griots: Preserving Local History Through Storytelling at the Cape Fear Museum. Organized by Athenian Press , the event featured a lovely array of artists in different genres (poetry, playwriting and screenwriting, dance, filmmaking, music). We shared our work and talents, each of us emphasizing art's ability to lift up, preserve, and pass along human stories that might otherwise be lost. The night before, in anticipation of the event, I kept thinking about stories. Not just those we tell, but those kept secret. As an Asian-heritage person, I know that silence is woven into my cultural legacy. My Asian-American friends and I have talked about the frustrating silence of our Asian parents, about the lack of demonstrativeness, both physical and emotional. Other cultures have this too, of course. Brits are famous for their "stiff upper lip." And Appalachian hillbilly culture, despite its propensity for tall tales, is known for endur...
Read more

Bears, Pigs, and Dragonflies: An Easter Sunday Non-Sermon

Image
My brother-in-law phoned me yesterday afternoon. He’d locked himself out of the house, and could I let him back in? Someone else might’ve been annoyed, but I was thrilled to get the call. More than once I’d done the exact same thing. Accidentally closed the locked door behind me and marooned myself outside. In fact, I’d done it earlier this week and had to call my sister over to rescue me. Luckily, we all have each other’s house keys and live close by. On the way to Craig’s place, I switched on the radio. It was already tuned to WHQR, the local public radio station, and was in the middle of an interview. I tried to fit the pieces together. A man was talking about battling a wildfire, trying to save his house. I assumed this was in California. He spoke of stomping on the fire for seven hours straight, his boots melting, his legs aching. At one point, he said, he tried using kayak paddles to beat back the flames, because his legs were just too tired. When a fire truck finally ar...
Read more