Love in you is not conditional,
but a heart’s love.
A poet’s love with the embrace
of childhood.
I can see the roads
that converged in you.
The poems you wrote are not
easy poems,
but the theater of your life,
setting its stage
on which you arranged
chairs and tables.
The clothes your family wore.
The expressions of a gaze.
The luster of hair.
Mouths shaped by catastrophe and joy,
grimaces and sweet remorse.
I am so taken by their Asian faces,
the beautiful darkness of their eyes,
the homilies of everyday exchanges
with your father.
The images of your mother’s words,
the empty chair of your brother.
The losses that bled your
family dry,
and their salvation from
pestilence and murder.
The broken promises of faith.
The delicate shadow
of an ancient culture,
and the lights lowered on the stage
until only you are speaking.
Until only you know how severe
the pain,
how huge the love inside you,
how awkward the faith
you put in words,
as if every poem were written
as if it might be the last.
Or the first of some new house
to enter,
some new beginning,
where life rises like a Phoenix,
as in your poem of love,
braiding your beloved’s hair.
You bring back the courage
of the gentleness you were
born with.
Poems,
little ships set upon the water
to be found on another shore,
by others like myself,
sitting in the audience
and crying,
that you lived at all,
survived,
to restore my compassion
for humanity.