Poetry Thursday, Asian Pacific Heritage Month

Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border
 ~Suji Kwock Kim
                               By which a strip of land became a hole in time
                                                                                     —Durs Grünbein

Grandfather I cannot find,
flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,
what country do you belong to:

where is your body buried,
where did your soul go
when the road led nowhere?

Grandfather I’ll never know,
the moment father last saw you
rips open a wormhole

that has no end: the hours
became years, the years
forever: and on the other side

lies a memory of a memory
or a dream of a dream of a dream
of another life, where what happened

never happened, what cannot come true
comes true: and neither erases
the other, or the other others,

world after world, to infinity—
If only I could cross the border
and find you there,

find you anywhere,
as if you could tell me who he is, or was,
or might have become:

no bloodshot eyes, or broken
bottles, or praying with cracked lips
because the past is past and was is not is—

Grandfather, stranger,
give me back my father—
or not back, not back, give me the father

I might have had:                               
there, in the country that no longer exists,
on the other side of the war—

Copyright © 2019 by Suji Kwock Kim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 6, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.