Poetry Magazine
Prayer for a Bamboo-Flowering Famine
Every half century, the synchronous flowering of bamboo causes famine in parts of India.
May we blossom every fifty years
without afflicting the people.
May our seedpods nourish rodents
who roam our groves
without rebuking lands with famine.
May sweet potatoes and rice save us.
May ginger and turmeric flourish
to the bitter distaste of rats
while tresses of bamboo flowers
changeling white wasps
load the groves with seed
in rare perennial synchrony.
May our sisters flower en masse
hundreds of square miles apart
in the pale night. May our shoots
pray a silent vision of healing,
our rhizome-laden memories:
Yes, we share our hunger
only once on this earth, my love.
Let us bless our fruit and multiply.
Source: Poetry (November 2010).
Biography
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004). She lives and teaches in southern California, where she is a novice harpist.
Poems by Karen An-hwei Lee
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Nature, Trees & Flowers
POET’S REGION U.S., Western
Poetic Terms Epigraph, Free Verse
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