Li-Young Lee

I love finding new poets and poems.

Last month I was introduced Li-Young Lee in a Sunday School class. We read “Eating Together” at the beginning of class on Christ as priest. What a joy to read and share the good words and thoughts of a poem while studying the Bible. When I got home from church, I started looking for more Li-Young Lee.

His images drawn me in and make my heart ache…

Eating Together | Li-Young Lee

In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

Eating Alone | Li-Young Lee

I've pulled the last of the year's young onions. 
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold, 
brown and old. What is left of the day flames 
in the maples at the corner of my 
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes. 
By the cellar door, I wash the onions, 
then drink from the icy metal spigot. 

Once, years back, I walked beside my father 
among the windfall pears. I can't recall 
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But 
I still see him bend that way-left hand braced 
on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my 
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet 
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice. 

It was my father I saw this morning 
waving to me from the trees. I almost 
called to him, until I came close enough 
to see the shovel, leaning where I had 
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade. 

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas 
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame 
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness. 
What more could I, a young man, want.

From Blossoms | Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Birthday flowers sitting on my desk in my study.