by
Debra Kang Dean
Foreword by Colette Inez
New Poets of America
Series
Born and raised in Hawai'i and living now in the continental United
States, Kang Dean writes poems of heritage and the struggle each
of us undergoes as we push the boundaries around us—be they
ones of family or location—and how distance brings the wisdom
that, "when you let the island in you/the road both does
and doesn't lead you back."
Stitches
What
can I say? I've even forgotten how
to
busy my hands with scraps of needle-
work,
dumb hands unwilling to commit to
what
the heart won't. Instead, I sit idle
staring
out windows. Nothing fits the contours
of
the landscape I was born to—absence
of
mountains, dense green, and salt air that smothers
like
family, like the waters I breathed penned
in
my mother's womb. Hard to say when I
chose
this: nothing the hand does
can
stitch time back to that place where mind and eye
might
mend the world to wholeness. Always
two
worlds. What pattern governs this surface
inscrutable
as the ocean, my mother's face?
©
BOA Editions, Ltd 1998
Available editions:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paperback
ISBN: 1-880238-66-7
Price: $12.50
Publishing Date: September 1998
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