https://sweetlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Poem_with_a_Wall_Between_East_and_West_-_Han_VanderHart.m4a
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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.


Han VanderHart lives in Durham, North Carolina, under the pines. They have poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI and elsewhere. Han is the reviews editor at EcoTheo Review, the editor at Moist Poetry Journal, and the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021).

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