Anya Krugovoy Silver 시 "Persimmon"

.

 

Edward Hirsch, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart 에서 (6)

 

Anya Krugovoy Silver considered herself a poet of witness to the experience of chronic and terminal illness.... Living with metastatic breast cancer also fueled and intensified her poetry. "My poetry got better," she told in interview in 2010.

 

 

Persimmon

 

I place you by my window so your skin can receive the setting sun,

so your flesh will yield to succulence, lush with juice,

so the saints of autumn will bless your flaming fruit.

 

Because cancer has left me tired.

 

Because when I visit God's houses, I enter and leave alone.

Not even in the melting beeswax and swinging musk of incense

has God visited me, nor when I'm bowed or kneeled or sung.

 

Because I have found God, instead, when I've crouched in bathrooms,

lain back for the burning of my skin, covered my face and cursed.

 

Persimmon: votive candle at the icon of my kitchen window,

your four-petaled stem the eye of God in the temple's dome,

tabernacle of pulp and seed,

dwelling place for my wandering prayers,

 

I am learning from you how to praise.

 

Because when your body bruises and softens, you are perfected.

Because your soul, persimmon, is sugar.

 

(2005)

 

 

   Notice how she purposefully repeats the soft sound of the letters c, s, and sh to bind the words together across all three lines [of the first stanza].

 

   Anya Krugovoy Silver died in 2018 at the age of forty [nine].

 

 

 

사진, wikipedia에서 -- 괜찮은 감/감나무 그림을 찾지 못해서