Poem with a Wall between East and West
It fell when I was four years old.
In the stacks of National Geographic
at my grandmother’s house, a photograph:
a daughter in the bath, a mother in a chair
beside her: one visiting the other
from the other side. Even the bath
was part of the visit. Let me be with you
while you soap your body. While the dust
soaks off your skin, until the grains
of the wall crumble behind us.
I’m thinking of this bath while I shave
my legs in a garden tub, by myself.
What we risk, what we always risk,
is our ordinary life. We give it up
for walls, for a life divided. Tonight
my sister will ask for chili and cornbread,
and I will light the gas stove, slice
green peppers and onions.
I will spoon cornbread batter into muffin cups.
They will rise in the oven like birds.
