☀ What Sparks Poetry: Jennifer Kronovet on Don Mee Choi's "DMZ Colony"

Raúl Zurita:
MY GOD IS WOUND

—written in the sky—
New York—June 1982
trans. by Anna Deeny Morales
from Sky Below

The night sings, sings, sings, sings
She sings, sings, sings beneath the earth
trans. by Daniel Borzutsky
from Songs for His Disappeared Love

Aimé Césaire:
rise
rise
rise
I follow you who are imprinted on my ancestral white cornea
Rise sky licker
trans. by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman
from The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

the waist of a nation

the 38th parallel north

The Korean Demilitarized Zone is approximately 160 miles long and 2.5 miles wide.
The DMZ runs across the 38th parallel, a division created afer World War II, with
the end of the 35-year-long Japanese occupation of Korea. The US occupied the
south, and the Soviet Union the north. The US still occupies South Korea with mil-
itary installations, bases, and troops. The Korean border is one of the most milita-
rized borders in the world.

------------------------------------------------------------ Saint Louis, Missouri
38.648056 north

On February 23, 2018, the day of my poetry reading with Daniel Borzutzky at the Pu-
litzer Arts Foundation, I walked across Forest Park in Saint Louis, Missouri. I was
heading toward the Saint Louis Art Museum. I heard a kind of muted, distant calling,
a polyphony of cries. Because I had never heard the flock calls of snow geese before,
I was baffled by the flood of sound, seemingly from nowhere and everywhere. In-
stinctively, I turned my head from side to side, then up. My head, tilted back, trig-
gered vertigo, a common symptom of Ménière’s disease. My ears flapped about
dizzyingly like a sparrow and followed the migrating snow geese above. The geese
promptly instructed me, a chorus:

. . . return . . . return . . . return . . . return . . . return . . . return . . .
. . . return . . . return . . . return . . . return . . . return . . . return . . .
. . . return . . . return . . . return . . . return . . . return . . . return . . .

Then they flew even higher, out of my ears’ reach. The snow geese must have felt
sorry for the homesick sparrow from a faraway place, for they dropped me a little line
from the sky.

SEE YOU AT DMZ

Alone again, I could only chirp to myself. Translator for hire! Hire, hire me.