Li-Young Lee - From Blossoms

“There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background…”

– Li-Young Lee
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Poet Li-Young Lee’s childhood was marked by the trauma of life as a refugee. Born in Indonesia in 1957 to Chinese political exiles, his family was forced to flee a number of countries before eventually settling in the U.S. In his poem, From Blossoms, Li looks beyond nationality and identity markers that divide us, and connects readers with the positive potential that occurs when our sense of being separate, solitary ‘selves’ drops. Just as Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh noted in his essay, “Emptiness means to be full of everything but empty of a separate existence,” From Blossoms reminds us that when we contact viscerally with the truth of our irrefutable interconnection and interdependence with all of life, we are vibrantly not alone. Then we touch joy.

Posted by Guest Editor Sam Shapiro

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.