Where, in this century, have I truly begun?
I was born afraid. And then a friend.
The friendship I had to learn, through trial
and every salt whisker of water, disappearing.

Loss made me, iron-hot, shaped me.
Without this ember grief, only burnished
light remains. Snowless.

In the great room of many volatile gods
where I keep burning. Hot grass.
Absence of trees. In which a world keeps noxiously turning
for the survival of what?     Gives loss its feral name.

Define  allegiance. Against the frame.
Who will love me when I am at last
ungovernable?     Answers the underground.

When I say I love you,
I mean before the conflagration of gods, their cruelty,
there is a door ablaze. I walk through.

All my life. Unceremonious, the morbid temperature
of a year. And then another. In the land of  despite, despite.
Let us fortify our rage. Incandescent.
Beneath the countenance of despair,
                                   you hold my face, holding me.

You have kept me. So, I am alive.
So you know how it ends.
To hear the wedding of the bees.

^{Seoul, May 1980}

cherry blossoms are opening.    
Pink clouds canopy the road to town,    
wind shakes out sakura rain like piggy-bank coins.    
A new school year erupts.

I walk the long road to university.    
Cherry petals confetti my neck,    
my shoulders, like feathers.    
Gathering into silken wings.

The Japanese planted cherry trees    
when they came, tossing seeds that cavity    
her womb like spent bullets.    
More sinister now than tank tracks

And wreckages. Even sudden beauty and rebirth    
a Japanese image.    
The Korean girls stolen and    
numerous as planted seeds.

Japan calls these trees Tokyo Cherry,    
says their petals represent Japanese soldiers’    
brief but beautiful lives.    
I learned so a previous spring and wondered

What other miracles and newness    
were so planted? How did Korean    
spring occur before Japan    
came with flourishing destruction.

What is a first day or university    
without washes of pink and white    
without green men glittering    
black guns and boots mapping the path?

Tall whispering grasses also planted    
to cultivate order and grow goodness and cleanness    
forever. As I enter my city I see    
one in ironed uniform

stalk-still inside a gust of blossoms.    
The string inside me catches    
as blushing petals ceremoniously collect    
on his blood-green kevlar.