Sunlight lifted with Her golden fingers

Hae.mi, as the golden sun interlopes
With the falling snowflakes, I see the destiny
Of how to trust the universe
It’s a woman who teaches, it’s a man who obeys

Like a lullaby of sweetly flowing years
“Trust the universe”
“You will be happy”
The nations can rage on, I do not care

Friends and lovers are free
To call my bluff, I enjoy the calm
Of solitude, the way the harmless hours
Merge into the sea of experience

Hae.mi, we do not need much love to survive
Only one drop of truth in our hearts
To believe that anything is possible
When the sun is low, and I am a colored singer

Who can hear the charm of the soul
It does not matter if I am simple, poor, barren
The world is wide, it extends to all people
I am a servant of the universe

With or without my consent, I pray at the chapple
Of her designs, and my tears are pure gratitude
There’s nothing left when memories burn away
Only beauty, only the inquiring mind

Of one for the many, of light for its unity
Of darkness, for the bird islands of life
You are as much alive as you dance in my cells
There’s no need to possess, when bliss is a substitute

In the meditation of our lives, art reassures us
That our suffering has spiritual meaning
The same mist hangs, as in ancient times
Your human eyes, pieces all that I am
To see divinity in a human form, is its own reward.

Chasing Freedom

Here there is a road that’s just opened

With scarlet leaves from November

The womb is wandering, time is skewed

Into branches of alluring encounters

 

 

Time is invisible, but I can feel her warmth and her breath

Hae.mi’s pattern of spell-binding designs

Like a new layer of myth-making and story-telling

There will be no rendezvous this time, only words

 

 

That hang between silences as soft as their landing

Passages to another state, remedies for life’s fascination

Laughing, I would unbutton your otter coat

Pour you a drink in the morning of your drunkenness

 

 

To keep you safe from your own wilderness and wildness

The lovely insanity you keep usually guarded and in check

I don’t have the heart to let you go, while

I keep traces of the sun and your honest glow

 

 

Hae.mi, does the dewy light hear our noon-time prayers?

As in an airy shrine, where our ancestors breathed

Might we know how to touch our own freedom again!?

All these unspoken words are left over Feelings

 

Hae.mi, I want the secret intensity of collusion

Not that I know what fiery touches are, I who have done without

The touch of the body or the needs of men

And if, my body becomes no longer mine

 

Would I pretend to blame a muse I know so well

From the darkness of time, where someone calls me

Surely she has no wings, only words to say that I am scoundrel or throng

And I, faltering through the calls of art

 

Yearn not for unity, but for intensity’s brightest wick

Where loving is for the mind, and not the senses to burn

Hae.mi, what I have become that I require not

The agony of the heart to feel alive

 

Or an army of the loins to feel as if I should possess

I am not that kind of lover, anyways

Only the poet’s unseen hand, and the touch of the eyes

Sowing seeds of language, where I am blind

 

Hoping for friendship in the ambiguity between the genders

Gone is thus rippling radiant youth and her precocious lies

Through my curiosity is still as hungry as the dawns

That first looked jeweled upon thee, for divinity suckled

 

In the womb of all things valuable and lovely

Like a beautiful dream, where I witness you Hae.mi.

With great delight I sat in her shadow

(Alternative name: Shadow dancers)

I’m going to fathom the Korean psyche

Once and fully, for an era of emotional revelry

Hae.mi, deliver me from the ritual

 

 

Where discovery is the fertilizer

Of the red blood in the rawest apple

Your cheeks to string me with ornamental majesty

 

 

At the emergency of poetry

At the threshold of clairvoyance

There is an empathy between your breasts

 

 

Where time is dense and flighty in-between

The feathers of the long agonizing months

The short breathless cycles taking you back into the artistic source

 

 

There, poetry is an oxygen of embracing

Irrationally more than we can have

With more moistness of vision that we can comprehend

 

 

A last luxury of feeling something sublime

Hae.mi, the trees will sink their trunks deeper this winter

And I will stand in solitude among their tall haloes

 

 

Pregnant with what comes next in woman’s world

A lily of the valleys of time and hope.

The Little Dew

 

Hae.mi, with the mood for loving kindness

I fall upon thee, as the last violin concerto

From some former life, which I cannot name

I copy the Korean scripture, as if it was known to me

Hae.mi, there is no life worth living, but the one

Not thine, not mine, but something else

Reminded from a child’s face, I linger there for long

Unable to remember the rapture then, of living

Of knowing with any certainty, anything

I am trapped between seasons aware of my own mortality

With a holy assembly of symbols, copied by time imperfectly

There’s no original art to this loneliness, only a kind of death

No God but a scattered Universe of galaxies, points of light

That tremble faster than I can move, Hae.mi, that’s it

You have surrounded me like water, like air, like perfume

And I am left with nothing but the memory of own imagination

That softly whispers without reply, in darkness, in the night

Where we cannot sleep and cannot name that thing between

The hours that are not tame, so sleek and pearly like the rain

Hae.mi, I’m lost to oracles and harmonics of melodic Korean

Without choice fruit, but the power to love in my own way.

E.J’s Trip rope

 

 

 

 

Eun Ji, how does a poem grow

From your shoulders as the years shine

Like a woman’s sadness that shuffles as it aches

Or elongated moves from man to man

 

In the cold months of identity in elegant death

I’ve watched you across books, speeches,

Highs and lows with hair hung in confession

And I’ve seen the fun house of your erections and

 

Encompassing many kinds of awareness

I’ve seen you cry in a poem

And I haven’t a clue what the end-game is

Nor how far we can push language at its brink

 

Or what gamification allows us to sing

When all the trees have been downed

And all the books have gone unread

Drowned in a sea of screens, lives churning

 

From reality, waiting impatiently at the

Digital timelines, tunnels into simulation

Eun Ji, will you even remember the syllables

That stretched your heart to your cheek

 

You were mad with the ocean once

And hearing you speak Korean, I felt landlocked

A permanently strange indentation in your psyche

You would never feel, you suspected it was

 

A native part of your own psyche, and I was just

The circus-gear of your imagination

An opened mouthed and clumsy sport gone unwhispered

No, I was the whisper of hypnosis that dilated

Your hardy gone funky work ethic of verse.

By the Mouth of Divinity

 

It’s as if infinity sleeps in your eyes
But when you look at me, I am made complete
the poetry of everything that is alive
I feel in you, like a moving work of light

You are the agile grace of air
And the calm of ocean’s deep
You are a yellow monument of the East
And a slight feather of all care

You are the familiar clay and melody
Of Mandarin, the whisper of Korean
And I ache to know the temples of Taiwan

Where on mountains I meet my purpose
And if I can ever understand, the rite of love
I want it to seize me like a paradise
Where harmony is the goal and dawn

Is the vistas of all I know to be true
The embellishing thirst of forests and lives
That were not meant to be alone but shared
A release of primitive genes from deep

In the Earth’s mystery of the vault of time
Where our ancestors felt the flowers and the blood.

I Audition to become Asian

I Audition to become Asian

I am white, but I love Asia
Mandarin is my second language
Korean dramas are my favourite media
I admire the rise of a people
Who are more industrious

Who age better and respect the collective
As noon every day I wonder
Why I live in a French City
When it’s Asia that I love
But, the truth is, I’ve a lot to learn

From Japan, India, Korean, China
I’m not Asian so there is so much
I do not understand, about the East
Being a western, I cannot pronounce
Their names or name their cities easily

I still have trouble differentiating faces
But the first step in becoming
A world citizen, is forgetting our last name
Forgetting where our ancestors happened
To breed and farm and fish

We are one people, but the Asian
Ones stand out to me, like a younger ambition
Born of ancient traditions
I recognize the future is Asian.

Gongjooh’s Halo #AppreciateAnAuthor @thisisEJKoh

My Instinct to Appreciate

In a paradigm where
I long to be more Asian
You teach me the universal language
Of doing what you love
And I’m a frugal amateur
At best, I’m a tweeting imitator

In the sense of how I long
To translate the ecstasy
Of mere words, on the panels
Of myriad forms of self-expression

You have no idea, of the intricacy
Of how much empathy
Is in an audience
In the inspirational power

Of a red brand, of a Korean song
On the lips of an American
Living the dream, sharing a voice
The surreal narrative of daughters

You’re the new world, you’re
The future of art, and it’s strange
That our whispers can be heard

Above the masses
It’s unusual how identity
Is transported in poetics
Poems that are evidence
Of the purity, of the wonder.

it lives

~ EJ Koh, in my humble opinion, is a modern-day princess of Asian-American Lit.