From “Twin Flower, Master, Emily”
Dear Emily,
For poetry – I have you. One need not be a House – One need not be a Nation or a Master for that matter. Delicate and beautiful, common in rich mossy woods, in pairs, we live. We are crimson-pink, particularly in the mountains. The rough terrain is not visible to many, but somewhat green and fatigued, demilitarized! A nod from far away is hollow. True men – How shall I greet them? Nation building is kind and generous. It is common to decline it. Emily, Shall I – bloom?
Yours, Twin Flower
From The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010). Copyright © 2010 by Don Mee Choi. Used with the permission of the author.
“One need not be a house,” “I push a petal from my Gown,” and “Shall I – bloom?” are from Thomas H. Johnson’s Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown and Company, 1962).
Don Mee Choi
Don Mee Choi is the author of DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), among others. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize.