Homage to the DMZ
Guards, please keep your triggers locked.
My camera, maps, and pick are left behind.
No spy, I do not come to break the code
Nor tour the warning walls. No uncle waits
To reunite across electric wire,
To touch my face and call it true to his
One memory: the burning trees and mud-
Caked women running in the hazy night.
No memories, but still my grief has skin
And hands to comb the Han with nets cast deep
And hands to comb the Han with nets cast wide
And lips to speak my peace. I can’t recall
The distant whistling growing louder when
It flashed across the dark, careened, then boomed
And echoed in the crash of pummeled walls
Collapsing in the strobe-lit dark, while late
Alarms began to wail of fighter jets
Diving low in rows for gunner range.
I wasn’t with the people trapped inside
Mistaken targets; throngs of people fled,
Ignored the old ones stumbling, children, parts
Of bodies hurled with rubble, shrapnel pierced
Debris, and smoke. A sister stopped to check
Her brother slipping down her back and strapped
To his, a kettle came untied and spilled.
Its grain was lost to sludge, cold and chance,
The midnight raids on fallout shelters smashed
By aircraft, tanks forever on the move
To battle fronts while people streamed against
Advancing troops to safety. Where was that?
It’s hard to tell when lines deployed in all
Directions, rivers soured by floating fish.
Yet hunger had to eat, examined hair for lice,
Dug roots and worms. The stench of shit and muck,
The stains of vomit, rags bound tight to stop
The spread of gangrene, sores mosquitoes sucked
Or numbed by fever’s spell, exposed, each eye
Ahead on sunset, nights of transit, hush.
The people wound through hills till nitrous gas
Lashed their faces peeled to bone. They shone
Absurdly white in morning fields of charred
Anemone awaiting help, return,
Some sign. “I’ll find you” promised. No one could
Identify their paths by what remained.
Missing children hid inside ravines
Or crept outside their hiding place to search
The ruins, found a metal strip and bent
It back-and-forth into a knife to fend
Off men who tried to snatch the can of food
That they had stolen as a barefoot gang,
Or stayed beside her broken body spread
Into a shape of loss I cannot trace
To find her soldier-lover marching south
Or husband killed in action. Nameless men
Forced themselves upon her, cupped some snow
To pack a ball inside her pleading mouth?
I can’t go on, can’t imagine how
She bore this child though I could be that child
Of mixed-up rivers, hard attempts to keep
A secret. Why return to unknown names
I feel are mine when snipers watch this ground?
While they remain, how can I begin?
Copyright Credit: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, "Homage to the DMZ" from Paper Pavilion. Copyright © 2007 by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Reprinted by permission of White Pine Press, www.whitepine.org.
Source: Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press, 2007)