Your Beauty burned and wrought me gently

Your Beauty burned and wrought me gently

You were all loveliness to me
And so it remains, the hard seed
Of light love, the greatest spark

Humans can experience, the luminescent
Giver-of-Dreams, my dear it was you
The Spring’s echo of echoes
Whose single note
Broke all chains, redressed all horizons

ii

That and a wistful silence
That surrounded your beautiful spirit
Carrying your intelligence

Like a song, a vibrating muted symphony
Of decades of creativity
You were all loveliness to me
And the love to which
I am most devoted to, return most often

iii

In private thoughts, which linger
Like the blossoming fragrance
Of my favourite trees, shrubs, flowers

That I recognize in each Spring
And in the people that have
Something resembling your flame
I was burned, invisible
Spare us no loveliness, life

Give it to us all in equal measure
With degrees of the purest joys.

Hearing voices like a Poem

Why Read Poetry

I have translated voices
To the ends of beauty
I have known intimately
Such wild abandon of soul

I cannot translate that
Spirituality transcends poetry
That I have experienced
I read poetry to get glimmers
ii
Because at times I have stopped
To look through the rain
For the wished for words
The wished for loves

The intimacy we are nomads for
I read poetry because the lady
Next to me on the bus
Is reading a book of poetry

And I wanted to know her
It all starts innocently enough
I read poetry because I know
That in the space between poems
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I will be looking in life for
The symbolism of her pages
A manticore muse I never find
The imagination of faery and ocean

And an intuition of whim
That undresses all other pleasures
By comparison of how superficial they are
The enjoyment of the spirit

I cannot translate that
But I can pretend.

To a Translator of Korean Poetry

To a Translator of Korean Poetry

We wanted to be writers
Cult of the amateurs and all
We wanted to witness other writers
In the social equation of

The reciprocity of our art
But we were timid, at first
Haunted by the prizes
That you won of contests

I didn’t enter, would never
Throwing ourselves out there
Invisible, pretending, unnoticeable
A snippet, a fragment, a leaf

Blowing in the virtual wind
We were like a tweet waiting to happen
And I watched the game of you
Shouting from the rooftops

About language on much smaller level
Of the ingredients for memories
That can be used as expositions
Can a soul be excited to tears?

That way time goes by without justification
And how we feel our inner child
Awake, but no longer afraid
Of the dark or the big bad dangerous world

We’ve come to call New York City
Or any other city on the planet
We wanted to be writers
It was the lifetime of bright green fingernails

Like Angels from Seoul where we migrated
3rd generation immigrants of being on fire
For doing what we love, and the backlash
Of how translation become a game

And novels became what we ate
At morning, noon, for dinner, midnight snacks.

Note: EJ Koh is featured in:
http://theculturetrip.com/north-america/articles/10-young-american-poets-changing-the-face-of-poetry/

LISTEN, POETRY HAS A FAINT VOICE EVEN SO

I will put chaos into sixteen lines
And remember the effort hidden in alphabets
The flood, fire and demon of all words
The order of memory put to paper, pen, screen

The arrogance of feeling misunderstood
For all eternity, I will put these confessions
To bed, without answers, evermore
I will strain to invisible problems

And witness an audience of writers
Struggling to find themselves
Past the hours, in their earthly dreams
I will pet the anxiety of paragraphs

And etch them in the frailty of my will
Stitching with careful industry my loss
That I might recall my tragedy in lines
The laughter trapped in summer crickets long ago.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/–467093425