News of Home

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

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