The Poiema Poetry Series
Poems are windows into worlds; windows into beauty, goodness, and truth; windows into understandings that won’t twist themselves into tidy dogmatic statements; windows into experiences. We can do more than merely peer into such windows; with a little effort we can fling open the casements, and leap over the sills into the heart of these worlds. We are also led into familiar places of hurt, confusion, and disappointment, but we arrive in the poet’s company. Poetry is a partnership between poet and reader, seeking together to gain something of value—to get at something important.
Ephesians 2:10 says, “We are God’s workmanship . . .” poiema in Greek—the thing that has been made, the masterpiece, the poem. The Poiema Poetry Series presents the work of gifted poets who take Christian faith seriously, and demonstrate in whose image we have been made through their creativity and craftsmanship.
These poets are recent participants in the ancient tradition of David, Asaph, Isaiah, and John the Revelator. The thread can be followed through the centuries—through the diverse poetic visions of Dante, Bernard of Clairvaux, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hopkins, Eliot, R. S. Thomas, and Denise Levertov—down to the poet whose work is in your hand. With the selection of this volume you are entering this enduring tradition, and as a reader contributing to it.
—D.S. Martin
Series Editor
Collage of Seoul
Poems by
Jae Newman
COLLAGE OF SEOUL
The Poiema Poetry Series
Copyright © 2015 Jae Newman. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0724-9
EISBN 13 978-1-4982-0725-6
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Jae Newman.
Collage of Seoul / Jae Newman.
88 p.; 23 cm—Includes bibliographical references and index.
The Poiema Poetry Series
ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0724-9
1. American Poetry—21st Century I. Title II. Series
PS3725.A237 2015
Manufactured in the USA.
For Natasha
Loran
I never needed to find myself.
They did a good job at the orphanage.
Scooped up all my pieces, tied them
tightly with a cub scout knot.
It came as a surprise, one night,
to hear my heart create a second beat.
Listening on a stethoscope, I heard
its space: a limpid muscle, likely dead.
Even so, the loran, it ached. Like any explorer,
I know naming is part of the job.
Charting without genes, without you,
I find it hard to trust the maps and stars
of other men. If I follow anything,
may it be the sound I cannot hear,
the feeling causing me to stand, the needle
blistering back and forth
as we meet behind my river nerve:
a thousand candles floating in paper boats.
Apartment Near Airport
Soft words folded into envelopes of prayer.
The dogs hear it first.
Not my prayer, but the sound
of shadows in the neighboring trees.
I can feel the shadow of the engine
before I hear it.
Body at rest, I wrestle with God,
nurse wounds in the dark.
Bracing for the heavy presence of the plane,
I cringe in its sound, crawl out
holding wings while steel hips rust
to reveal a man who was never a child,
a man who wanders airports alone at night
attracted to the ebb and flow of runways,
where beneath the grindings of identity,
there’s comfort in the fading echo,
the tail of the plane vanishing
into layers of mysterious clouds.
Unnamed
To know you never named me is to know
why I must name my life away in words, in waiting.
I went to the library, one day, and traced a peninsula,
Korea, into my sketch book.
I wonder if, later, you ever picked a name for me
while doing household chores,
hanging clothes along the Han River shore, or maybe
walking home from the port
with a bag full of fish, and soap
to wash your hands of burying my name in dirt.
Mother Tree
I am free
cut loose from
the branches of the Mother Tree,
surrendered
to the fostered fingers of a silver bird.
I was nine
when I found you, planted,
arms part of an unreachable sky.
Running alone at dusk,
I cried for your attention
the single time in my life
pointing at a bloody shin.
I wanted you to see
what a snapped-back branch had done to me.
On a hill in the woods, I wiped blood away
until all the leaves were red, then
stood up, your roots quivering
as I kissed the bark, gripped an ax.
Pushing Chi
If these hands cannot conceive
what I see,
cannot understand his left
from mine, then
I exist in compromise
alone.