I loved you before I was born.
It doesn't make sense, I know.
I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see.
And I've lived longing
for your ever look ever since.
That longing entered time as this body.
And the longing grew as this body waxed.
And the longing grows as the body wanes.
The longing will outlive this body.
I loved you before I was born.
It doesn't make sense, I know.
Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse
of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes.
And I've been lonely for you from that instant.
That loneliness appeared on earth as this body.
And my share of time has been nothing
but your name outrunning my ever saying it clearly.
Your face fleeing my ever
kissing it firmly once on the mouth.
In longing, I am most myself, rapt,
my lamp mortal, my light
hidden and singing.
I give you my blank heart.
Please write on it
what you wish.
From The Undressing: Poems by Li-Young Lee. Copyright © 2018 by Li-Young Lee. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
I dreamed you.
I waited 45 years for you
to find me.
I have nothing to give you
But these places
I have been.
I own no home.
I carry my life with me
In boxes
on my back.
Sometimes when you look
at me
I want to show you
Everything.
How the stars turn in the
night sky over Santa Fe.
How snow falls like filigree
through a blue moon.
How a slice
of sweet Hawaiian
Mountain apple
between your lips
calls forth the
forest
it was plucked from.
I want to take you places
You have never been.
With anyone.
I want to tell you everything.
How once when I was 26
I drove around and around
searching for other Lesbians.
I want to show you every scar.
I want to tell you about
Anita and Parker.
How death came for them
In the name of cancer
claiming parts of me
you can never have.
I want to whisper
Everything.
As you stall into my
shoulder
Incense rising,
dusky room.
Copyright © 2023 by Willyce Kim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 1, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.
Poem II from “Twenty-One Love Poems,” from The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.