Emily Jungmin Yoon: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.

Comments

[Denise Duhamel]

Amen to the sacred feminine! This is a beautiful poem.

[Rebecca Levenson-Smith]

Love this, thank you!

[Jack Skelley]

Blessed art thou. Thank you for this!

[clarinda]

What Jack Skelley said. Thanks, beautiful poet for this poem. Thanks beautiful soul Terry.

[Hailey Leithauser]

Love this poem - I'm ordering her book!

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for the comment, Clarinda.

[matthew rohrer]

Christianity is an invasive species.
Love it Emily.

[Don Berger]

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.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Prof. Berger, for that insightful take on the poem.

[Chris Mason]

Wonderful poem. “Let us eat / what makes us holy.”

[Peter Kearney]

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.

[Robert McDowell]

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.

[Terence Winch]

Robert---thanks for that comment.