C.O.R.A Diversity Roll Call

This is week #4. Things are going well but we want to grow so do join us for this week's assignment. May is designated Asian Heritage Month. April is National Poetry Month so to celebrate both, I am sharing about a poet.

Kimiko Hahn
born in 1955 in Mount Kisco, New York

Her credits include Air Pocket (Hanging Loose Press, 1989), Earshot (HLP, 1992), The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), and Mosquito and Ant (W.W. Norton,, 1999).

...besides the threat of terrorism, economic chaos, etc.--is my young adult daughters. As a mother it is my duty to protect them; so the conflict is how to write about some of the things that we experience as a family without compromising them. It is a difficult issue for me. ~Kimiko Kahn , interview at Voices from the Gaps.

IN CHILDHOOD

things don’t die or remain damaged
but return: stumps grow back hands,
a head reconnects to a neck,
a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.
Later this vision is not True:
the grandmother remains dead
not hibernating in a wolf’s belly.
Or the blue parakeet does not return
from the little grave in the fern garden
though one may wake in the morning
thinking mother’s call is the bird.
Or maybe the bird is with grandmother
inside light. Or grandmother was the bird
and is now the dog
gnawing on the chair leg.
Where do the gone things go
when the child is old enough
to walk herself to school,
her playmates already
pumping so high the swing hiccoughs?

posted online at the diacenter
See Fertile Ground entry.