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Look at you now, two women and a man,
as though sprung full-blown out of Zeus’ pate.
Where did they go, those fifteen years, those frightened,
skinny little souls we so impulsively
declared our own? Sun Ok, Sun Young, Sun Il--
you smile at me across this feast we’ve made
with eyes once roiled by dark Korean miseries
I understood yet could not comprehend.
Some say the eyes are mirrors of the soul.
If that is true, then your three souls reflect my own,
the way a lake, at night, reflects the stars-- the sea above
becomes the sea below, and all that wild
black rushing tumult is contained, and tamed,
and offered back, crystalline as love.
Joanna Catherine Scott is the author of Indochina's Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam; Cassandra, Lost, an historical love story; Charlie and the Children, a novel of Vietnam (VVA Veteran Book-of-the-Month); The Lucky Gourd Shop, a novel of Korea (Booksense top ten choice and nominee for Booksense Book-of-the-Year. Excerpts received awards from Literal Latté, Georgia State University Review, and Crucible). In addition, her chapbooks, Birth Mother and Coming Down from Bataan, won the Longleaf Poetry Award and the Acorn-Rukeyser Award, respectively; and New Jerusalem won the Capricorn Poetry Book Award. Most recently, she received the Americas Review Prize for Social Poetry, the PEN/Nob Hill Poetry Prize, and the North Carolina Poetry Society's Poet Laureate Award. Breakfast at the Shangri-La, winner of the Black Zinnias Poetry Book Award, is pending from the California Institute of Arts and Letters.
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