(Demilitarized Zone)
Like a wedding ring, or the bride’s green ribbon, you shelter me.
No business but war. You remind me of a kind of heaven.
A cairn of rocks casting shadows in the shape of a man.
Thou art the table before me in the sight of my adversaries, thou dost
anoint my head: oil and rain, thou art a ghost with a girl’s mouth,
thou art not the making of my dreams—under water, under cliff,
under this long suitcase of earth and bombs. More than any mortal
could gather beneath the skirt of the sky.
You are never eager, nor famished, nor pale with a craving for white
clothes or my nocturnes.
Let your lynx approach, even tiger, even its wild outline.
You need no ferryman or the obolus of the dead.
If I put a coin in my mouth I taste copper, not the corpse.
They say that bodies fertilized the ground so well the trees grow
bright and tall. The bones blur. We return alive.
Copyright Credit: Sun Yung Shin, "Demilitarized Zone" from Rough, and Savage. Copyright © 2012 by Sun Yung Shin. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press, www.coffeehousepress.org.
Source: Rough, and Savage (Coffee House Press, 2012)