Harvest<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My daughter is a collector of fragments:
\nsingle beads, stray buttons, broken twigs.
\nShe trolls the garden, catching seedpods
\nand pebbles in her pocket. This is not to sing
\na strange-eyed child, some oracular pure
\nwho sees what we have lost. She is not knowing,
\njust doing. A small thing jealous of the world,
\nsnatching her share from the groundfall.<\/p>\n
After the first wave crested and cleared,
\nthe beach was littered with golden fish
\nstaring upward, still flapping as if to swim.
\nThey say the children came running to gather,
\nfilling skirts and shirtsleeves, crowing, gleeful,
\nbrown feet flashing salt. Only then did the sky
\nopen its sudden true hand, the second wave
\nreaching forward to sweep them all away.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“Harvest” first appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.<\/em><\/p>\n Kim-An Lieberman<\/a> is an almost-lifelong Seattlelite. Her collection of poetry, Breaking the Map<\/em>,<\/a> won a first-book prize from Blue Begonia Press<\/a> in 2008. Her work also appears in journals and anthologies including Poetry Northwest, <\/em><\/a>Prairie Schooner, Lantern Review, CALYX, New Poets of the American West,<\/em> and My Viet: Vietnamese American Literature in English.<\/em> A recipient of awards from the Jack Straw Writers Program <\/a>and the Mellon Foundation for the Humanities, Kim-An has been a featured reader at venues including the Skagit River Poetry Festival,<\/a> the San Francisco International Poetry Festival, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley and has spent many years in the classroom, teaching kindergarteners through college students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Harvest My daughter is a collector of fragments: single beads, stray buttons, broken twigs. She trolls the garden, catching seedpods and pebbles in her pocket. This is not to sing a strange-eyed child, some oracular pure who sees what … Continue reading