☀ Today's Poem: "Homage to a Picture Bride" Garrett Hongo

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October 11, 2023

When years were long with labor in the sugarfields,
I sought a wife, at last, choosing her from a photograph.
She was but fifteen, a shy child of a bride
wrapped in faded kimono, as I likewise was wrapped in wind,
a man of thirty, weathered by work in the green seas
of cane, my savings finally enough to take my wedding vows.
Before then, it was to the coming world that I made vows
to wrest a new life from the earth and leave the fields
so I might cast my eyes without sorrow from mountains to the sea,
never again to falsify who I was in a photograph
as though I were a clerk or a saddler, sheltered from the constant winds,
the image I'd sent, a deception to my young bride.
She was young but daily growing, my new bride.
We stood on the pier and took our vows,
and I led her to the North Shore, its mountains torn by winds,
below them the rippling green fields
of cane stretching all the way to the sea,
a landscape no one would care to photograph.
Before we left, someone took a photograph—
this laborer and downcast picture bride
half his age at their dockside ceremony of vows—
staged before a background of slate-gray seas
and the small curls of waves tossed by winds,
impassive faces resigned to a hard life in the canefields.
We were destined never to leave the fields—
my wife gave birth to a son we did not photograph
as, before he could cry, he was taken by the wind
that came betrothed as his own promised bride,
journeying from the Afterworld over storm-tossed seas,
our mortal dreams of a better life all but disavowed.
She herself died within a year of our vows
and so finally escaped the sugarfields,
a ghost in flight, ha-alele-hana, over the dread seas
that never would be captured in a photograph,
so that, ever after, only resolve would be my bride
and my mourning cloak a coat of harsh winds.
Only the wind knows my sorrows now, whatever vows
my bride and I made are forever lost in the sugarfields,
this photograph the one moment we lived apart from life's cold seas.

from the journal SEWANEE REVIEW

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Forward

I tried to write something in free verse on this subject—a Japanese American picture bride of the early 20th century—while at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis in September 2022. I was inspired by hearing the tune "The Trees They Do Grow High" by the Pentangle. But it just didn't work no matter how many drafts I made. Then I put the poem aside when some months later the thought came to re-cast, re-compose it as a sestina. BANZAI!
Garrett Hongo on "Homage to a Picture Bride"

Review of New Collected Works of Bert Meyers
"Time and again, the poems selected for the book show Meyers extracting ineffable poetic moments from the most mundane sources. He achieves this through a highly personal understanding of metaphor and effective juxtapositions. Again, from 'Postcards': 'Dwarfs and hunchbacks / are loading wagons. / Gardens drip in the heat. / Flowers burst in the walls. / An ox appears / like a hill in an alley.'"
via BROOKLYN RAIL

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What Sparks Poetry:
J. Michael Martinez on Reading Prose
"'A small disunified theory' constellates from a lyrical response to Leslie Jamison's 'Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain' to a further diagnosis of late-stage capital's easy co-opting of raw moment's bodily musk spill, our meat's revolutionary intensities suddenly dimmed by the weight of brands, these 'names'."

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