25 poems by Li-Young Lee 1. THE WEIGHT OF SWEETNESS 2. Early in the Morning 3. Eating Alone 4. The Gift 5. A Story 6. The Hammock 7. Mnemonic 8. From Blossoms 9. Pillow 10. Mnemonic 11. The Hour and What Is Dead 12. Night Mirror 13. Little Father 14. ONE HEART 15. Station 16. Black Petal 17. From Blossoms 18. A Hymn to Childhood 19. Falling: The Code 20. Nocturne 21. Eating Together 22. I Ask My Mother to Sing 23. This Hour and What Is Dead 24. Immigrant Blues 25. Arise, Go Down 1. THE WEIGHT OF SWEETNESS No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness. Song, wisdom, sadness. Joy: sweetness equals three of any of these gravities. See a peach bend the branch and strain the stem until it snaps. Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness and death so round and snug in your palm. And, so, there is The weight of memory: Windblown, a rain-soaked bough shakes, showering the man and the boy. They shiver in delight, and the father lifts from his son’s cheek one green leaf fallen like a kiss. The good boy hugs a bag of peaches his father has entrusted to him. Now he follows his father, who carries a bagful in each arm. See the look on the boy’s face as his father moves faster and farther ahead, while his own steps flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors under the weight of peaches. 2. Early in the Morning While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast, before the birds, my mother glides an ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligrapher’s ink. She sits at the foot of the bed. My father watches, listens for the music of comb against hair. My mother combs, pulls her hair back tight, rolls it around two fingers, pins it in a bun to the back of her head. For half a hundred years she has done this. My father likes to see it like this. He says it is kempt. But I know it is because of the way my mother’s hair falls when he pulls the pins out. Easily, like the curtains when they untie them in the evening. 18. Falling: The Code 1. Through the night    the apples outside my window    one by one let go    their branches and    drop to the lawn. I can’t see, but hear the stem-snap, the plummet through leaves, then the final thump against the ground. Sometimes two    at once, or one    right after another. During long moments of silence I wait and wonder about the bruised bodies,    the terror of diving through air, and    think I’ll go tomorrow to find the newly fallen, but they all look alike lying there dewsoaked, disappearing before me. 2. I lie beneath my window listening    to the sound of apples dropping in the yard, a syncopated code I long to know, which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know the meaning of what I hear, each dull    thud of unseen apple- body, the earth    falling to earth once and forever, over    and over. 3. Eating Alone I've pulled the last of the year's young onions.  The garden is bare now. The ...

1. 25 poems by Li-Young Lee
1. THE WEIGHT OF SWEETNESS
2. Early in the Morning
3. Eating Alone
4. The Gift
5. A Story
6. The Hammock
7. Mnemonic
8. From Blossoms
9. Pillow
10. Mnemonic
11. The Hour and What Is Dead
12. Night Mirror
13. Little Father
14. ONE HEART
15. Station
16. Black Petal
17. From Blossoms
18. A Hymn to Childhood
19. Falling: The Code
20. Nocturne
21. Eating Together
22. I Ask My Mother to Sing
23. This Hour and What Is Dead
24. Immigrant Blues
25. Arise, Go Down
1. THE WEIGHT OF SWEETNESS
No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.

2. Song, wisdom, sadness. Joy: sweetness
equals three of any of these gravities.
See a peach bend
the branch and strain the stem until
it snaps.
Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
and death so round and snug
in your palm.
And, so, there is
The weight of memory:
Windblown, a rain-soaked
bough shakes, showering
the man and the boy.
They shiver in delight,
and the father lifts from his son’s cheek
one green leaf
fallen like a kiss.
The good boy hugs a bag of peaches
his father has entrusted
to him.
Now he follows
his father, who carries a bagful in each arm.
See the look on the boy’s face
as his father moves
faster and farther ahead, while his own steps
flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors
under the weight
of peaches.
2. Early in the Morning

3. While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.
She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.
But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.
18. Falling: The Code
1.
Through the night
the apples

4. outside my window
one by one let go
their branches and
drop to the lawn.
I can’t see, but hear
the stem-snap, the plummet
through leaves, then
the final thump against the ground.
Sometimes two
at once, or one
right after another.
During long moments of silence
I wait
and wonder about the bruised bodies,
the terror of diving through air, and
think I’ll go tomorrow
to find the newly fallen, but they
all look alike lying there
dewsoaked, disappearing before me.
2.
I lie beneath my window listening
to the sound of apples dropping in
the yard, a syncopated code I long to know,
which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know
the meaning of what I hear, each dull
thud of unseen apple-
body, the earth
falling to earth
once and forever, over
and over.

5. 3. Eating Alone
I've pulled the last of the year's young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.
Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can't recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way-left hand braced
on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.
It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.
White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.
4. The Gift

6. BY LI-YOUNG LEE
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!

7. I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
5. A Story
Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can't come up with one.
His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.
In a room full of books in a world
of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy
will give up on his father.
Already the man lives far ahead, he sees
the day this boy will go. Don't go!
Hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!
You love the spider story. You laugh at the spider.
Let me tell it!
But the boy is packing his shirts,
he is looking for his keys. Are you a god,
the man screams, that I sit mute before you?
Am I a god that I should never disappoint?
But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story?
It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence.
6. The Hammock

8. Li-Young Lee, 1957
When I lay my head in my mother’s lap
I think how day hides the stars,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside my mother’s singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and the kindergarten,
once each morning and once each afternoon.
I don’t know what my mother’s thinking.
When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder:
Do his father’s kisses keep his father’s worries
from becoming his? I think, Dear God, and remember
there are stars we haven’t heard from yet:
They have so far to arrive. Amen,
I think, and I feel almost comforted.
I’ve no idea what my child is thinking.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother’s hopes, older than I am
by coming before me, and my child’s wishes, older than I am
by outliving me. And what’s it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.
7. Mnemonic
Li-Young Lee, 1957

9. I was tired. So I lay down.
My lids grew heavy. So I slept.
Slender memory, stay with me.
I was cold once. So my father took off his blue sweater.
He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back.
It is the sweater he wore to America,
this one, which I’ve grown into, whose sleeves are too long,
whose elbows have thinned, who outlives its rightful owner.
Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight,
it is black in the folds.
A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and
rhymes
to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my
father
would be ashamed of me.
Not because I’m forgetful,
but because there is no order
to my memory, a heap
of details, uncatalogued, illogical.
For instance:
God was lonely. So he made me.
My father loved me. So he spanked me.
It hurt him to do so. He did it daily.
The earth is flat. Those who fall off don’t return.
The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only
gradually.
It won’t last. Memory is sweet.
Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet.
Once I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.

10. 8. From Blossoms
Li-Young Lee, 1957
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
9. Pillow
There's nothing I can't find under there. Voices in the trees, the
missing
pages of the sea.

11. Everything but sleep.
And night is a river bridging
the speaking and the listening banks,
a fortress, undefended and inviolate.
There's nothing that won't fit under it:
fountains clogged with mud and leaves,
the houses of my childhood.
And night begins when my mother's fingers
let go of the thread
they've been tying and untying
to touch toward our fraying story's hem.
Night is the shadow of my father's hands
setting the clock for resurrection.
Or is it the clock unraveled, the numbers flown?
There's nothing that hasn't found home there:
discarded wings, lost shoes, a broken alphabet.
Everything but sleep. And night begins
with the first beheading
of the jasmine, its captive fragrance
rid at last of burial clothes.
10. Mnemonic
I was tired. So I lay down.
My lids grew heavy. So I slept.
Slender memory, stay with me.

12. I was cold once. So my father took off his blue sweater.
He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back.
It is the sweater he wore to America,
this one, which I've grown into, whose sleeves are too long,
whose elbows have thinned, who outlives its rightful owner.
Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight,
it is black in the folds.
A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and
rhymes
to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my
father
would be ashamed of me.
Not because I'm forgetful,
but because there is no order
to my memory, a heap
of details, uncatalogued, illogical.
For instance:
God was lonely. So he made me.
My father loved me. So he spanked me.
It hurt him to do so. He did it daily.
The earth is flat. Those who fall off don't return.
The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only
gradually.
It won't last. Memory is sweet.
Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.
Once I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.
11. The Hour and What Is Dead

13. Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.
At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning.
Someone tell him he should sleep now.
My father keeps a light on by our bed
and readies for our journey.
He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy's pants.
His love for me is like sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces
clean through with each stroke of his hand.
At this hour, what is dead is worried
and what is living is fugitive.
Someone tell him he should sleep now.
God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.

14. At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind
and helpless. While the Lord lives.
Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.
I've had enough of his love
that feels like burning and flight and running away.
12. Night Mirror
Li-Young, don't feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity?
And don't be afraid
when, eyes closed, you look inside you
and find night is both
the silence tolling after stars
and the final word
that founds all beginning, find night,
abyss and shuttle,
a finished cloth
frayed by the years, then gathered
in the songs and games
mothers teach their children.
Look again
and find yourself changed

15. and changing, now the bewildered honey
fallen into your own hands,
now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.
Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.
And time? Time is the salty wake
of your stunned entrance upon
no name.
13. Little Father
I buried my father
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night.
I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest.
Sometimes I see past them
to the tables spread for a wedding feast.
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won’t drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet

16. in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life.
14. ONE HEART
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
15. Station
Your attention please.
Train number 9, The Northern Zephyr,
destined for River's End, is now boarding.
All ticketed passengers
please proceed to the gate marked Evening
Your attention please. Train number 7,
Leaves Blown By, bound for The Color of Thinking
and Renovated Time, is now departing.
All ticketed passengers may board
behind my eyes.
Your attention please. Train number 4, The Twentieth Century,
has joined The Wind Undisguised to become The Written Word.
Those who never heard their names
may inquire at the uneven margin of the story
or else consult the ivy
lying awake under our open window.

17. Your attention please, The Music,
arriving out of hidden ground
and endlessly beginning, is now the flower,
now the fruit, now our cup and cheer
under branches more ancient
than our grandmother's hair.
Passengers with memories of the sea
may board leisurely at any unmarked gate.
Fateful members of the foam may proceed to azalea.
Your attention please.
Under falling petals, never think about home.
Seeing begins in the dark.
Listening stills us.
Yesterday has gone
ahead to meet you.
And the place in a book a man stops reading
is the place a girl escaped
through her mother's garden.
And between paired notes of the owl,
a boy disappeared. Search for him
goes on in the growing shadow of the clock.
And the face behind the clock's face
is not his father's face.
And the hands behind the clock's hands
are not his mother's hands.
All light-bearing tears may be exchanged
for the accomplished wine.

18. Your attention please. Train number 66,
Unbidden Song, soon to be
the full heart's quiet, takes no passengers.
Please leave your baggage with the attendant
at the window marked Your Name Sprung from Hiding.
An intrepid perfume is waging our rescue.
You may board at either end of Childhood.
16. Black Petal
I never claimed night fathered me.
that was my dead brother talking in his sleep.
I keep him under my pillow, a dear wish
that colors my laughing and crying.
I never said the wind, remembering nothing,
leaves so many rooms unaccounted for,
continual farewell must ransom
the unmistakable fragrance
our human days afford.
It was my brother, little candle in the pulpit,
reading out loud to all of earth
from the book of night.
He died too young to learn his name.
Now he answers to Vacant Boat,
Burning Wing, My Black Petal.
Ask him who his mother is. He’ll declare the birds
have eaten the path home, but each of us

19. joins night’s ongoing story
wherever night overtakes him,
the heart astonished to find belonging
and thanks answering thanks.
Ask if he’s hungry or thirsty,
he’ll say he’s the bread come to pass
and draw you a map
to the twelve secret hips of honey.
Does someone want to know the way to spring?
He’ll remind you
the flower was never meant to survive
the fruit’s triumph.
He says an apple’s most secret cargo
is the enduring odor of a human childhood,
our mother’s linen pressed and stored, our father’s voice
walking through the rooms.
He says he’s forgiven our sister
for playing dead and making him cry
those afternoons we were left alone in the house.
And when clocks frighten me with their long hair,
and when I spy the wind’s numerous hands
in the orchard unfastening
first the petals from the buds,
then the perfume from the flesh,
my dead brother ministers to me. His voice
weighs nothing
but the far years between
stars in their massive dying,
and I grow quiet hearing

20. how many of both of our tomorrows
lie waiting inside it to be born.
17. From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
19. A Hymn to Childhood
Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn’t last?

21. The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder in the attic?
The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a new era,
and the house around you grew bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with more and more
people missing?
The photographs whispered to each other
from their frames in the hallway.
The cooking pots said your name
each time you walked past the kitchen.
And you pretended to be dead with your sister
in games of rescue and abandonment.
You learned to lie still so long
the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled
safety of a wing. Look! In
run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,
turning over the furniture,
smashing your mother’s china.
Don’t fall asleep.
Each act opens with your mother
reading a letter that makes her weep.
Each act closes with your father fallen
into the hands of Pharaoh.
Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,
still a child, and slow to grow.
Still talking to God and thinking the snow
falling is the sound of God listening,

22. and winter is the high-ceilinged house
where God measures with one eye
an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,
and counts on many fingers
all the ways a child learns to say Me.
Which childhood?
The one from which you’ll never escape? You,
so slow to know
what you know and don’t know.
Still thinking you hear low song
in the wind in the eaves,
story in your breathing,
grief in the heard dove at evening,
and plentitude in the unseen bird
tolling at morning. Still slow to tell
memory from imagination, heaven
from here and now,
hell from here and now,
death from childhood, and both of them
from dreaming.
20. Nocturne
That scraping of iron on iron when the wind
rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t
quit with, but drags back and forth.
Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just
beyond the screened door, as if someone there
squats in the dark honing his wares against
my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing,
nothing and anything might make this noise
of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning
of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust,
or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows
that should not bend. Something stiffens that should
slide. Something, loose and not right,

23. rakes or forges itself all night.
21. Eating Together
In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
22. I Ask My Mother to Sing
She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.
I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.
But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

24. Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.
23. This Hour and What Is Dead
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.
At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning.
Someone tell him he should sleep now.
My father keeps a light on by our bed
and readies for our journey.
He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy’s pants.
His love for me is like his sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces
clean through with each stroke of his hand.
At this hour, what is dead is worried
and what is living is fugitive.
Someone tell him he should sleep now.

25. God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.
At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind
and helpless. While the Lord lives.
Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.
I’ve had enough of his love
that feels like burning and flight and running away.
24. Immigrant Blues
People have been trying to kill me since I was born,
a man tells his son, trying to explain
the wisdom of learning a second tongue.
It’s an old story from the previous century
about my father and me.
The same old story from yesterday morning
about me and my son.
It’s called “Survival Strategies
and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.”
It’s called “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,”
called “The Child Who’d Rather Play than Study.”
Practice until you feel
the language inside you, says the man.

26. But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used?
And me, confused about the flesh and the soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you?
You’re always inside me, a woman answered,
at peace with the body’s finitude,
at peace with the soul’s disregard
of space and time.
Am I inside you? I asked once
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart.
If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not,
she answered, at peace with the body’s greed,
at peace with the heart’s bewilderment.
It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening
called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,”
called “Loss of the Homeplace
and the Defilement of the Beloved,”
called “I want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.”
25. Arise, Go Down
It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts
that brushed my face and I opened my eyes

27. to see from a cleft in rock His backside;
it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep
my eyes closed and stand perfectly still
in the garden till it leaves me alone,
not to contemplate how this century
ends and the next begins with no one
I know having seen God, but to wonder
why I get through most days unscathed, though I
live in a time when it might be otherwise,
and I grow more fatherless each day.
For years now I have come to conclusions
without my father’s help, discovering
on my own what I know, what I don’t know,
and seeing how one cancels the other.
I've become a scholar of cancellations.
Here, I stand among my father’s roses
and see that what punctures outnumbers what
consoles, the cruel and the tender never
make peace, though one climbs, though one descends
petal by petal to the hidden ground
no one owns. I see that which is taken
away by violence or persuasion.
The rose announces on earth the kingdom
of gravity. A bird cancels it.
My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything
might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war.
My father said, Never take your both eyes

28. off of the world, before he rocked me.
All night we waited for the knock
that would have signalled, All clear, come now;
it would have meant escape; it never came.
I didn’t make the world I leave you with,
he said, and then, being poor, he left me
only this world, in which there is always
a family waiting in terror
before they’re rended, this world wherein a man
might arise, go down, and walk along a path
and pause and bow to roses, roses
his father raised, and admire them, for one moment
unable, thank God, to see in each and
every flower the world cancelling itself.
https://myinneredge.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/the-weight-of-
sweetness/
Lee, Li-Young. 1990. The City in Which I Love You
(Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd.)
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/eating-alone/
Lee, Li-Young. 1995. The Winged Seed: A Rememberance
(NY: Simon & Schuster)
Lee, Li-Young. 1986. Rose (Brockport, NY: BOA Editions,
Ltd.)
Li-Young Lee, “The Hammock” from Book of My Nights.
Copyright © 2001 by Li-Young Lee.
Li-Young Lee, “Mnemonic” from Rose. Copyright © 1986 by
Li-Young Lee.
Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms” from Rose. Copyright © 1986

29. by Li-Young Lee.
From Book of My Nights (BOA, 2001) by Li-Young Lee.
Copyright © 2001. Appears with permission of BOA Editions,
Ltd.
Li-Young Lee, "Mnemonic" from Rose. Copyright © 1986 by
Li-Young Lee. Used with the permission of The Permissions
Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions,
Ltd., boaeditions.org.
From The City In Which I Love You by Li-Young Lee.
Copyright © 1990 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with permission
of BOA Editions, Ltd. All rights reserved.
From Book of My Nights, by Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee, “Little Father” from Book of My Nights.
Copyright © 2001 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the
permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.
"One Heart" by Li-Young Lee from Book of My Nights,
published by BOA Editions, Ltd. Copyright © 2001 by Li-
Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
from Behind My Eyes (W W Norton, 2008), copyright © 2008
by Li-Young Lee, used by permission of W W Norton &
Company, Inc. - See more at:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/station#sthash.9X5KvLC0.d
puf
From Book of My Nights (BOA, 2001) by Li-Young Lee.
Copyright © 2001. Appears with permission of BOA Editions,
Ltd.
Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms” from Rose. Copyright © 1986
by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of BOA
Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
“A Hymn to Childhood,” from Behind My Eyes by Li-Young
Lee. Copyright © 2008 by Li-Young Lee. Used by permission of
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Li-Young Lee, “Falling: The Code” from Rose. Copyright ©
1986 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of BOA
Editions Ltd.
Li-Young Lee, “Nocturne” from Rose. Copyright © 1986 by Li-

30. Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions Ltd.
Li-Young Lee, “Eating Together” from Rose. Copyright © 1986
by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of BOA
Editions Ltd.
Poem copyright ©1986 by Li-Young Lee, whose most recent
book of poems is Behind My Eyes, BOA Editions, Ltd., 2009.
Poem reprinted by permission of Li-Young Lee and the
publisher.
Li-Young Lee, “This Hour and What Is Dead” from The City in
Which I Love You. Copyright © 1990 by Li-Young Lee.
Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions Ltd.
“Immigrant Blues,” from Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee.
Copyright © 2008 by Li-Young Lee. Used by permission of
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Li-Young Lee, “Arise, Go Down” from The City in Which I
Love You. Copyright © 1990 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with
the permission of BOA Editions Ltd.
Due date: the United States New York time March 10, 2016
Thursday 3:00PM
Single Space
This is an English poem class. Choose Li-young Lee’s one poem
from 25 of his poems(I will provide the 25 poems list by Li-
young Lee to you, plz see attach) and write 1500 words poem
analysis essay about it. You mainly write analysis of one poem
for this essay; and also you can find one or two other poems in
the 25 poems list in order to make a comparison to the poem
which you mainly wrote about.
It is an English poem class, so you need to know the author’s
background (Li-young Lee) and his writing style; also it needs
to include the analysis method, such as the poem’s meter,
Rhythm, rhetoric, meaning, idea, tone and other English poem
analysis method. Please understand these terms meaning before

31. you start the assignment.
Here is the equipment, please satisfy the requirement below:
One essay, 1500 words minimum, explicating a poem. Before
you hand in the assignment, please make sure you know exactly
what is meant by plagiarism
Write an essay concentrating on one of these poems. Explicate
the poem, including references to the themes common in this
writer's poems, the forms/style, and the language of the poet in
the poems you’ve chosen. We talked in class about the
narrators of the poems. How would you describe the persona
most common in the poems by this poet? Refer to some
of the other poems in this group for comparison and contrast.
You may do research on the poet you choose. Make sure that
you include reference (notes and bibliography).