For Saige

a poem by Rev. Earl Kim

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By the time I open my eyes
to the sound of your cry,
the summer night has grown deeper.
The darkness that silently crossed the border
hides itself under the eaves,
and I feel the dry air of a foreign land
even being half-awake
to my dull senses.
Hill Country, Texas, this is
your strange place of birth.

Holding up your hungry body,
as I turn on the owl-shaped nightlight,
the illusion of constellations
projects onto the ceiling, and there,
I come across the American dream
flickering like the muted starlight
in a world of Asian immigrants
under the opaque ceiling.
Beyond such a limit, I pray,
may your dream tonight
be the sonorous Milky Way
shimmering across the sky.

Perhaps we are on our own in this life
since the moment our umbilical cords were cut,
yet I wish our embrace may carry us
through the lonely nights
with the stars gliding in the flow
of gravitational ties in their orbital dances,
with the dim moonlight on the floor
where humble love and hope
still glimmer with a shade of wonder.
And I know some rivulets of tears and
sudden longings disappear one night,
like the white noise that soothes you
and is soon dispersed
over the threshold.

If we walk into a dream
over a lullaby bridge,
may our clumsy motions become a song?
Carrying you on my cactus-like back
as if you are a small wing grown out of it,
I weave the purest lights in our eyes
with the thread of faith
and hang it by a window as a mobile.
Then, I look into the distance and watch
the way a grove of oaks is put to sleep—
the way cloudy blankets of a nebula swaddle them,
the way countless stars pat their dry, arched backs
as if nothing happened,
as if it has always been this way, and
the way they willingly embrace each other
in a corner of the old cosmic time.