Land of the Morning Calm
by Diana Keren Lee
Three and a half decades after the war,
we searched for skyscrapers, taxis, palaces.
Saw a man pissing at the end of a road at dusk,
blue accruing to peach then dissolving to black.
Our parents our tour guides,
I wondered about their lives, and mine:
had I been born there, had I never been born
with the urge to speak, of what they carried,
what I translated from their faces.
The car approaching the mountain,
the first I had ever seen—
later I came to know “mountain after mountain,”
the Korean proverb san neomeo san.
Haitians say Dèyè mòn, gen mòn.
“Beyond mountains, there are mountains.”
This poem reflects on language as landscape, the loss of language, and the limits and possibilities of language and translation. As a child, seeing my parents’ homeland—a landscape different yet familiar—was transformative. The title phrase “Land of the Morning Calm,” an English translation of Joseon, is used to refer to Korea more often in English than in Korean. While the name suggests peace, Korea and Haiti have experienced significant political upheaval. The Korean War never officially ended, leaving Korea divided, and immigrants in the United States face deportation.
Time and space helped the poem find its form in tercets. Earlier drafts expanded on the phrases “mountain after mountain” and “beyond mountains, there are mountains,” but the poem now ends on these images/phrases. The last four lines can also be viewed as a quatrain (reminiscent of a villanelle, which has five tercets and a quatrain). Mountains are a symbol of expansiveness as well as obstacle. Language can be an obstacle, but it helps articulate the world around us.
Diana Keren Lee is the winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A National Poetry Series finalist, her work has appeared in Boston Review, The Common, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Austin, she lives in Colorado.