Poem of the Week | January 29, 2024

“The exodus of young men” by Georgia San Li is our Poem of the Week.

Georgia San Li is currently at work on poetry and Portrait from the Tarmac, a novel. Her recent poetry was shortlisted for the 2023 Oxford Poetry Prize and appears or is forthcoming in La Piccioletta Barca, Confluence (UK), Glacier, LIT Magazine, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection Wandering was a Minerva Rising finalist (Finishing Line Press 2024). She is an alumna of the Kenyon Review Novel Workshop and the Community of Writers at Olympic Valley in poetry and fiction.
 

“…Admit it, and your house will fall to ruin;

by Nan Cohen

The exodus of young men

from South Korea / after the war / second sons like my father / from yangban houses / who fulfilled their military duties / then left for America / for their futures / with their intellects / with ambitions and philosophies of life / they chose from the choices they had / and he / chose to start his family at Eagle Heights / not far from my birthplace / not far from University Hospital / where I have returned to my future / my American heartland / in a white rental / white / the Korean color of grief / it is more visible in hazardous skies / and now I remember / how he loved to fish in these lakes / and I imagine schools of perch / swimming to old Bayside for hundreds of years amid spotted cows / harkening home to the canton of Glarus, / once Ennenda / Netstal and Riedern / schools of perch / their whirring clasped under my ribs / as if caged in the Earth / in its heavy / aged ice / I grip the wheel quaking / holding my yearning for the ocean / in great swells / suddenly / they flood my limbs / pinch my feet and ankles / swollen with generations past / whom my father brought over oceans in exodus / the inevitable reformation along wild grasses / fields of corn and barley / where warm chestnut trees once stood in dusk like this

listening for history / poetry / and literature / in memories of my father along pastures and traces / whirring quietly / whirring home / to this land amid cherry orchards and milk

Author’s Note

I was reading Czesław Miłosz in 2022, the year that I wrote this poem, and returned to the image in the first few lines of “Beautiful Times” from A Treatise on Poetry:

Cabbies dozed under St. Mary’s Tower,

Just taken from a pot of dye on Easter…

In these opening lines, we enter History through a beloved city, a beautiful place from which History starts its movements. And from this came the inkling that perhaps History is carried through time, resurrected from one child to the next, lest we forget.