Motherhood is the only Truth of Life

Hae.mi, every verse is a child of love
As I watch you with your child
I think upon the qualities of your womanhood
Your ancestry and your design upon time

The heart as a gulf, and a bridge and a blessing
I who have experienced so little true joy
Can admire the cherishing of a maternal love
That exceeds in brightness and in sport

The spring’s treasured moments of a young mother
I watch you with your child, as I would the stars
Or holding the Earth in my mind as I would
Imagine life caring for all the galaxies

Hae.mi, so when you think of me, remember
I die at dawn and daybreak, every day
To witness your majesty as a woman and a mother
With no decisions and no receiving, I’ll carry on

So as to die with the morning and the evening
We might support the future in a familiar face
Like your son or the billions of lights
That swim in the hawk-like night

And the swan-like soul of all living things
Those eyes, a little bit like our own,
Those hearts, that feel and hope and love
Like we do, Hae.mi, that is your gift

That I can love you like a father who watches his daughter
Taking care of the world while she travels it
In the years and greetings and journeys
Given to her, and what will live on in her sons

In his daughter, who will one day become a mother…

 

Photo Courtesy.

Her Gratitude Tasted

In palaces of fire and water,
Hae.mi, how does the heart not lose herself?
When from rim to rim she squanders her beauty
In the pangs of gorgeous motherhood!

And it arouses me, because we stayed at home
Where roses meet their blowing end
And fragrance falls on thirsty lips
By gates of Eden, erect and wet

Our first elation met vaguely understood
Beneath the mirrors and hunger of our youth
Not all in world I have despised
I, who could not have who I desired most

Beneath friendly fire and blossoms of the misunderstood
In winged freedom’s last designs
Where I touched beneath your skin
The kisses have no names that you can utter

The pleasures have no shame when
Each to each are wed in friendship,
And obscene gratitude, and a lifetime’s ache.

Photo Courtesy.

Songs of Ren & Chou

The dawn disrupts me with your fierce qualities
I am so vulnerable, watching thee
Fight for causes I wish I could own with thee
And belong to a voice that has that melody

My words rain over your tweets like New York lights
I delight in your footsteps in the snow
In the dark hazel and rustic baskets
Of your laughter, I follow where you go

I delight ever in your small triumphs
And grow a Titan’s fever for your trials
Small place and random wonder for the
Valley below, my dears, it’s anonymous

Like how spring will come to you in cherry trees
And the worlds you will see, that I will not
But I can share the foam of your dreams from afar
Like raspberry whispers in the after-thoughts

Of my heart that is bigger than it should be
And my soul that hangs lost in a quote
My love is an open-secret for your sport
Humanity disrupts the things we used to know

Don’t go too far off, let me ride the companionless dark
I want to know what aches at the empty stations
And how your movements chime in the smiling years
The lady soldiers of technology, freedom and the new world

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where
The idealism of the young is never squandered
It relapses in waves across the cosmos
And burns in the memories of we are meant to become.

Blooming into Native Serendipity

(Lost in Gaia)

I love you for not knowing me
But echoing me, like some stranger’s lost invincibility
I love you for your kindness
In the same sorrows we have all fled

Like youth’s retreating eyebrows
Like songs we used to sing
I love you for your no tomorrows
For your doomsday moods and emotive vitality

For your hairy shadows, and Costa Rican reunions
I followed how the healers move the mystics
Just today, as if it was a story I was familiar with
I love you for being in love and falling

In love with something bigger than yourself
I love you for your storytelling and your
Witnessing, the quiet birth of the apocalypse
Of every blue moment entombed in rapture and in awe

I was captivated by your Venusian fertility of art
And poetry and the musing of eternal questions
I love you for loving deeper in sweeter tones
Than I found use in doing, after doppelganger loneliness

And Aspergian humility, I played in shadows
I love you for not being there, when the divine stood on
Inside of me like a flame always glowing
I love you for your absence, for being

Especially preoccupied with your own drama
For your personal story of mirroring and copying
The feelings we all had all long, they still seemed
More blessed in your company

Somehow more vivid on your face
In your essays up the Western coast
Entwined and enshrined, I love you for the book of poems
You told the ocean you’d share with the world
I’m still waiting for my copy, by the way.

An Ocean of Stars

The ocean is a great intelligence,
It’s feminine, wide and free
An earth-soul shelter for our freedom
So when we reincarnate, we have something

To go by, stars in the milky way
Our galaxy of sensitive pulsating, Oh Hae.mi
I feel the stars calling me by my name

Si-in sees the ocean’s beauty
Si-in reads the woman’s magic
Si-in feels the shores wealth

The ocean has led me on into the Earth
I have no time to be unhappy
No time to say the sky meets the ocean

At some point, Hae.mi kisses the horizons
But that is not my job, I write
You course in my blood, my blood of the ocean

Shadow dancer, and strange, Si-in leaves into the inside
Without a care for convention, softly entranced
To the rhythm of her voice, that’s kindness

On the lulling roof of waves, below the
Throng of moonlight, that’s peace
A freedom of stars reflected on water

For so many miles in the half-dark
That’s creation right there, Si-in knows
Hae.me, our legend has a brightness

We’ve made stories between the waves
We must not lose faith in humanity
Humanity is like the sea, said Gandhi.

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!?

I Close My Eyes

 

Let me kiss the softness of the night

Hae.mi, to which I’ll never know

I am the wildness in your purity

Though if I yearn for it too much, it will go

Into the music of misaligned intention

Into the pictures of faces unknown

Back to the masses of our stories

Our stories that are always wounded

You say I remind you of some unpleasantness

Can I not exalt and rejoice in each invisible encounter

For in my poverty of heart, I’m indebted to be haunted

I am very dark, but lovely, and loving – or else

An anonymous thief, ready to be caught

As a famous beggar for gifts of tenderness

I am the mystic honey in the simultaneous midnight

I am the lonely wolf of lost time, there’s no room for me

Between earthly lives and mothers and sons, I’ve been left

Abandoned by the vulnerable timid ones so cautious

There are silver scales in my snowy pupils

And I am your student, fine-arted through the fall

Let me embrace what I cannot possess, Hae.mi, I am dumbfounded

Though I indeed was once so innocent

There’s no closure until the time of new lovers

I know how sleek the seasons move

The souls of winter are my fondest friends

We’re all souls of mothers and pieces of each other.