Spaces We Leave Empty

By Cathy Song b. 1955 Cathy Song

The jade slipped from my wrist

with the smoothness of water

leaving the mountains,

silk falling from a shoulder,

melon slices sliding across the tongue,

the fish returning.

The bracelet worn since my first birthday

cracked into thousand-year-old eggshells.

The sound could be heard

ringing across the water

where my mother woke in her sleep crying thief.

Her nightgown slapped in the wind

as he howled clutching his hoard.

The cultured pearls.

The bone flutes.

The peppermint disks of jade.

The clean hole

in the center, Heaven:

the spaces we left empty.

Source: Picture Bride (Yale University Press, 1983)

Biography

Poet Cathy Song was born and raised in Hawaii and is of Korean and Chinese descent. Her work draws on her rich Korean-Chinese ancestry as well as her experiences as an American and a woman. In poems that have been compared by critics to the muted tints of watercolor paintings, Song has consistently created a world rich with narrative and imagery that transcends her own ethnic and regional background. Song herself resists . . .

Continue reading this biography