Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border
By which a strip of land became a hole in time
—Durs Grünbein
Grandfather I cannot find,
flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,
what country do you belong to:
where is your body buried,
where did your soul go
when the road led nowhere?
Grandfather I’ll never know,
the moment father last saw you
rips open a wormhole
that has no end: the hours
became years, the years
forever: and on the other side
lies a memory of a memory
or a dream of a dream of a dream
of another life, where what happened
never happened, what cannot come true
comes true: and neither erases
the other, or the other others,
world after world, to infinity—
If only I could cross the border
and find you there,
find you anywhere,
as if you could tell me who he is, or was,
or might have become:
no bloodshot eyes, or broken
bottles, or praying with cracked lips
because the past is past and was is not is—
Grandfather, stranger,
give me back my father—
or not back, not back, give me the father
I might have had:
there, in the country that no longer exists,
on the other side of the war—
Copyright © 2019 by Suji Kwock Kim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 6, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“My parents and grandparents were all born in what is now North Korea. I’ve never met my grandfather, and my father last saw his father when he was ten years old. We’re not alone: there are millions of 이산가족 (eesan gajok, separated families), including my father’s and mother’s families, divided between North and South. You could fill a whole city with separated families, although this number is dwindling as the elderly pass away.”
—Suji Kwock Kim
Suji Kwock Kim
Suji Kwock Kim was educated at Yale University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow.