|
Koon Woon
USA  Koon Woon was born in a small village near Canton in 1949, immigrated to the United States in 1960, and presently resides in Seattle’s International District. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Poem and the World: An International Anthologyand Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry. As the publisher of the literary zine, Chrysanthemum, and Goldfish Press, Woon is a vocal advocate for Seattle literature. The Truth in Rented Rooms is his first book, and Water Chasing Water was released by Kaya is 2013. Of himself he says: " I remain a village boy from China that for the rains and mists of a lifetime, a straw coat will do." I’ve told you the fragility of my love…
I’ve told you of the fragility of my love,
and yet how it endures like a leaf pressed
into a book,
how the pain and how inappropriately the
hate,
like the Nagasake and Hiroshima bombs
left a silence whereof no man can speak…
It is this that is the fragility of my love,
Knowing my awareness is pain; I leave you in
my mind
the many times I think of the silence
wherein my mother’s voice should drone, but
the gentle hands released me to bed where
the smell of kerosene
from the village lamp burnt past the hour of
moths
when we shut the window to village crickets,
when the tender bamboo shoots, their new
fragile leaves bud
in the fragility of my love for you,
as I want to travel blind with you as far
into the night
until the sun rises in Japan, and I will
sail my junk
into phantom waters. Yet my love endures
like cloth flapping in the wind…
(First appeared in Unwound Magazine, then
collected in The Burden of Sanity and Other
Poems, published by Chrysanthemum
Publications, 2004)
© Copyright, 2015,
Koon Woon. |