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Say Grace
In my country our shamans were women
and our gods multiple until white people brought
an ecstasy of rosaries and our cities today
glow with crosses like graveyards. As a child
in Sunday school I was told I’d go to hell
if I didn’t believe in God. Our teacher was a woman
whose daughters wanted to be nuns and I asked
What about babies and what about Buddha, and she said
They’re in hell too and so I memorized prayers
and recited them in front of women
I did not believe in. Deliver us from evil.
O sweet Virgin Mary, amen. O sweet. O sweet.
In this country, which calls itself Christian,
what is sweeter than hearing Have mercy
on us. From those who serve different gods. O
clement, O loving, O God, O God, amidst ruins,
amidst waters, fleeing, fleeing. Deliver us from evil.
O sweet, O sweet. In this country,
point at the moon, at the stars, point at the way the lake lies,
with a hand full of feathers,
and they will look at the feathers. And kill you for it.
If a word for religion they don’t believe in is magic
so be it, let us have magic. Let us have
our own mothers and scarves, our spirits,
our shamans and our sacred books. Let us keep
our stars to ourselves and we shall pray
to no one. Let us eat
what makes us holy.
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Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018), winner of the 2019 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize. She has also translated and edited a chapbook of poems, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019). She is the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD candidate in Korean literature at the University of Chicago.
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Mansindo_(萬神圖), early 19th-c. Korean shamanic painting.
Amen to the sacred feminine! This is a beautiful poem.
Posted by: Denise Duhamel | November 21, 2021 at 12:46 PM
Love this, thank you!
Posted by: Rebecca Levenson-Smith | November 21, 2021 at 12:50 PM
Blessed art thou. Thank you for this!
Posted by: Jack Skelley | November 21, 2021 at 01:10 PM
What Jack Skelley said. Thanks, beautiful poet for this poem. Thanks beautiful soul Terry.
Posted by: clarinda | November 21, 2021 at 01:41 PM
Love this poem - I'm ordering her book!
Posted by: Hailey Leithauser | November 21, 2021 at 01:54 PM
Thanks for the comment, Clarinda.
Posted by: Terence Winch | November 21, 2021 at 02:17 PM
Christianity is an invasive species.
Love it Emily.
Posted by: matthew rohrer | November 21, 2021 at 02:54 PM
What's strong right away in this poem is the swing from the end of one line into the start of the next, this exceptional forceful enjambment. And then this speed of the lines and the way the voice seems to keep coming from different directions as it pours forward. Maybe on top of it all, this: "point at the way the lake lies,/with a hand full of feathers,/and they will look at the feathers. And kill you for it," the enviably great heart of this poem, which changes the day. Glad you wrote this Emily and thanks Terence for showing it.
Posted by: Don Berger | November 21, 2021 at 03:50 PM
Thanks, Prof. Berger, for that insightful take on the poem.
Posted by: Terence Winch | November 21, 2021 at 06:10 PM
Wonderful poem. “Let us eat / what makes us holy.”
Posted by: Chris Mason | November 22, 2021 at 03:07 PM
The assertion that Christianity did not find a home in the Orient, the late great Catholic theologian Hans Kung once countered with the example of Korea. If he could have heard this throbbing, pleading poem, he might have been moved to silence.
Posted by: Peter Kearney | November 23, 2021 at 07:56 PM
Resistance is carried out with such elegant force that one might miss it, yet it is there like a throbbing nerve, felt but invisible to the eye. Breathe in Yungmin's expansive spiritual intention. Thanks, Terence, for sharing this wisdom.
Posted by: Robert McDowell | November 27, 2021 at 11:14 AM
Robert---thanks for that comment.
Posted by: Terence Winch | November 27, 2021 at 12:22 PM