Kara Pyo

This is a series of poems I wrote this spring reflecting on the Lord’s Prayer through the lens of my everyday life in Korea. It was a powerful spiritual exercise for me. To consciously pray through the details of the world around me and to see the glory of God again and again. (I posted the first one, Our Father in Heaven, here).

HALLOWED BE YOUR NAME

eunni, oppa, dongsaeng, seonsaengnim, halmoni

No one needs a name tag here. We walk the streets as family,
connected in a way that makes me want to stoop down
and pick up the wallet you dropped and hand it back to you.

You have a name.
I’ve heard it through the television, through the telephone, through
the formal introductions never separate from your relationship to me.

I wouldn’t say it out loud.

Never born, never going to die.
This is the eternal song of the One whose name doesn’t change.
He calls us (all) Friend
His name is everything we need:

I am

YOUR KINGDOM COME

On the corner, four-foot popsicles cover the old convenience shop windows.
Discount ice cream signs are installed quickly,
the store is cleared out, swept out, shelves replaced by freezers.

We can’t walk by without going in.

This is the world in it’s place
with variety and color and every flavor of ice cream.
I’ll have chocolate and vanilla. Would you like sweet potato? Green tea mochi?

We lean over freezers, trying to decide which ice cream bar we should buy.
All is right.

YOUR WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

On the playground near the fire station, three girls
play kindly together.
“Gongjunim, bbali wa!” (princess, come quick!)
These girls are not petty.
Not careful in their dresses and tights and buckled shoes.
They run through the sand, turn on the water fountain,
spray the front of their clothes.
Their hands are filthy, but they are not concerned
with cleanliness or perfection.
They are not interested in a show.

They play and play and play

until their mothers come with scolding faces and bicycles
with extra seats on the back,
ending their playdate in the castle,
ending their time in the sand.

Bamboo is propped up to the right of the playground,
standing tall with the help of wooden braces.
The drain by the fountain swirls with water ready to escape.

Across the way firefighters train for their next rescue.
They start the motor of the safety raft in the
parking lot behind the station.
They lift the tallest ladder and start to climb.

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD

My husband taught me to divide freshly cooked rice into four sections
before scooping it into bowls.
To mindfully make the sign of the cross
in gratitude and remembrance.

My mother always did this, he tells me.

I imagine her hands today,
decades of nourishment raking through murky rice-water,
rinsing ssal until the liquid runs clear.

There were times her family went without,
when the rice was low but she found a way to
fill the bellies of her children anyway.
She combined the rice with barley or another
stretching grain, and suddenly there was enough.

There is always just enough.

It is foreign to my framework of abundance,
but I prayerfully copy the motion:
give us this day our daily bread.

FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS AS WE FORGIVE OUR DEBTORS

At the subway elevator, elderly men and women shuffle
past my double stroller
to make their way inside.
Occasionally they look back sympathetically
at my arms holding a baby and pushing two big kids
at the same time.
It must be hard, they say to each other as the doors close
swiftly, like a window screen sliding into place,
keeping all the bugs and bees and birds
out of the house.

DON’T LEAD US INTO TEMPTATION

(I submitted this poem recently and I’m waiting to hear back…can’t post it here yet, but I want to hold a place for it in the series)

DELIVER US FROM EVIL

Gray clouds smear across the stormy sky like dark fingerprints
smudged on a dull piece of paper.
Outside the window it’s raining pollution.

Umbrellas bob with footsteps, disks rounded down over morning-heads walking to work.

There is so much work to do.

We step out into the gloom and dark,
underneath a makeshift shelter.

A thin piece of nylon covers our heads.

FOR YOURS IS THE KINGDOM

My daughter asks at the dinner table
what it means to have authority.

In the back room the kids retell famous stories:
“I am Goliath! Who is going to kill me?”

This is our place in the world, as darkness slayers, as healers,
recognizing evil and committing to its defeat.

As sons and daughters of the King,
there is never any doubt in tiny minds that we are

inhabitants of another Kingdom.

AND THE POWER

Speak the truth in love and you will find
love is the only way to speak.
Maybe you want to hear yourself say something profound, but there is no
profundity in spring.
We’ve seen it before. Last year and the year before.
We know the pace of women running umbrella-less in the rain.
We stand with mouths open like trap doors, thinking universal words of pleasure:
Beautiful! Magnificent! Lovely!
It is exactly what we need.
In all the beauty of its repetition
we bow down.

AND THE GLORY FOREVER

And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all people will see it together. Isaiah 40:5

When the time comes, each delicate cherry blossom is set in motion.
Soft hues of pink and sharp white petals stand out against an ice blue sky.

They congregate, and when the slightest wind blows, they fall.

This is also how we are: beautiful and fragile, vulnerable to the wind and rain.

This is how we interact, how we move as a unit
or get swept away.

This is our hearts collected. Grouped together.

Popping into the open air,
no longer able to stay tucked away in seclusion,
we behold the unstoppable glory of God.

AMEN

There is no goodbye
may it be so
there is no ending to this conversation.
Your eyes will never close.
selah

Occasionally my mom tucks
old magazines into the
oversize packages she
mails to Korea.
Between the rattly pantry items
and bulky toys for the kids
a Martha Stewart Living will appear.

The glossy floral cover promises “sheet cakes that wow”,
“mini room makeovers”, and “melt-in-your-mouth meringues”.

While flipping through the pages I’m fanned with a breeze of
nostalgic summers in America.
Filed between a feature on roses and animal-shaped cakes is an
article explaining how to decorate your home like a popsicle.

I am not particularly interested in the décor of page 120,
in the orange accented bed or the coordinating shower curtain stacked with teal, hot pink, and orange,
but sitting on my living room floor, listening to afternoon
traffic and summer birds,
I feel the predictability of a cooling
fan as it pivots and homesickness as it blows heavy on my face.
I want to turn two-dimensional and slip
into the scene like a paper doll.

A wind of desire, of jealousy, of longing
grabs my attention
and I turn the page quickly as if it were that easy to skip over the difficult parts
of a life simply by closing a magazine

Summer heat blows in like a sadness.
I feel it against my skin.
I turn my head to resist it like the first gust of
hot air that escapes from an oven.

It helps to remember that this feeling comes every year.
It’s inevitable: I will feel sad in June.

I feel tiny and insignificant, flying around like a bug
caught in the path of a giant windshield on summer vacation.
I am in danger of being squashed by the heaviness.

It’s been 5 years since we moved to Korea, and it seems to be
getting harder. I look at my kids who barely speak the language,
watch their huge eyes as I try myself to communicate with some
small intelligence.

I am ignorant and unaware.

This is the humbling thing: I live a beautiful life
in the middle of difficult circumstances.

We walk to the big box store
four subway stops from home.
We pass the milk tea stand on our way to the bookstore.
An oasis.

Nearby a lady cradles her older daughter. She looks like she’s cradling arms and legs as she
swings her around and smiles.

When she sets her down,
her white T-shirt shouts across the aisle as
bold black letters bleed in all capital letters:
DON’T FEEL SMALL.

In an instant I don’t. I stand up straighter as I push my boys
toward the sticker books.

The choices we make when we feel a sudden sadness
find us stripped down and thirsty,
and if we’re lucky, sipping milk tea on the way home.

This poem was first published by Upwrite Magazine.

In the early evening, a Korean grandmother
works alone in her garden by the river.
She sits low to the earth, hunched over like a bright purple cushion,
planting vegetables and picking weeds.

One side of the garden is outlined in garbage:
bottles, plastic bags, empty food containers
dumped in a line and partially buried.
The other side is lined with bundles of sticks roughly tied together.

I watch her from the river trail as she works in a tiny section of the dirt.
She never moves farther than her arms can reach.

Next to her walker, in the shade of the cherry blossoms,
she silently manipulates what she can,
ignoring every bicycle as it passes.

I’m overwhelmed by the amount of work
and her lack of mobility. Her efforts seem impossible
until I notice the canola flowers rising in a patch of triumph.

They blow quietly in the evening air like yellow canaries behind her back,
still parallel to the ground at the other end of the early spring garden.

There is no praise, no congratulations, no one to keep her company.

Just the sunset arriving shortly,
bouncing through the yellow flowers,
reflecting off the line of trash,

and the woman in her garden,
dutifully tending to the next thing.