a poem

Yesterday my uncle and I went to the house of a friend of his that I've seen a few times and really like. His name is Mr. Pak, but we usually refer to him as the Tin Man because of the role he played in a performance they and two pastors put together as part of a yearly community gathering (guess who played Dorothy?). Although he lives near the third biggest metropolis on the globe, he managed to find a neighborhood that feels like the country. He lives there with his wife and son in a traditional style Korean house. They have a small garden around the edges of the house and a small persimmon tree near the gate. He likes to drink country rice-wine and can play the traditional Korean bamboo flute, which along with the following earned him the additional pseudonym "dionysus plays the flute" on my uncle's phone: he has read a lot of and is grateful to Nietzsche. His specialty, however, is James Joyce, on whom he wrote a dissertation (in English!) even longer (and probably better written) than my thesis. He and my uncle like to get together to hike or, more often, to play guitar and sing. Yesterday he kindly translated a verse of a song he had just sung into English so I could get a sense of how beautiful and poetic he felt it to be, and he asked me if I had written any poems. As we were leaving the two of us waited by the persimmon tree for my uncle to come back out and I told him that persimmons reminded me of a poem of that title I once read for a class. He said he would like to read it, so I looked it up at home and figured I might as well share it as an easy post. Before we left, though, he reached into the tree and broke off a bit of branch for me to take home. It has two persimmons on it. I'd never held a persimmon before that save for one other time, the summer after I took that poetry class, when someone sent me one in the mail.

The poet is Li-Young Lee. Enjoy.

My only reservation about persimmons, though, is that they can look suspiciously similar to tomatoes...
(painting by Elizabeth Brandon)