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First snow
by Susannah Stubbs
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The poem is about 봉선화 (bongseonhwa), the flower whose petals or leaves you can crush and use to dye your nails, and the legend behind it. Susannah Stubbs, the poet, is at The Late Spring Moon Ik-hwan School just outside of Gangjin in South Jeolla Province. She is in Korea for 2019-2020 under the auspices of the Presbyterian Young Adult Volunteer Program. She writes: "I’m 21 years old and I graduated from Hendrix College in May with a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing. I’m an aspiring writer, and I believe that writing can help people claim their own stories and gain understanding and compassion for the stories of others. I also care deeply about social justice and learning how to make the world a more sustainable, peaceful, accepting place." As you can see in the background of the photo, she is also a singer-songwriter. Additionally, she is an artist-in-cyber-residence for Open Horizons and founder of the Becomings Collective, an arts collective for aspiring writers and artists. |
Tiny piles of crushed leaves,
Cool, wet, dark green,
On the pinky, ring, middle fingers of my left hand,
One on my right hand’s fourth finger.
My friend takes a plastic glove and carefully detaches its fingertips,
Puts them over my nails and wraps twist ties just above my knuckles.
I touch things with caution all afternoon until she tells me I can remove them,
And when I wash my hands my fingertips are a deep tangerine, verging on scarlet,
The color bleeding from my nails out to the skin around them.
When they see my stained hands on their screen, my loved ones squint and say:
What happened to your fingers?
Not Cheetos, not an art project gone awry, I assure them,
I wanted this.
When they see my hands, girls here smile, lean closer and say:
If the color remains until the first snow of winter,
Your wish for love will bloom.
I think of the wishes I grew up making--
Birthday candles, stray eyelashes, shooting stars,
How little patience they required.
This is a slow wish, a wish that grows with time.
The harvest moon comes and goes.
Kind people take me in and give me rice cakes and coffee,
Others walk with me through prisons and protests and camp towns,
They tell me of a pain that I will only ever understand from the outside.
They invite me to listen,
And a crescent of white forms at the bottom of my nail bed
When I go to bed at night, people I love are waking up.
When I sleep, old cells die and new cells form in their place.
I leave crumbs of my DNA in the city’s churches and subways and cafés,
I listen to more stories of past hurt, new hope,
And I see my own hurts and hopes with different eyes.
The white space on my nails grows,
And it feels as if every one of my cells is changing, changing too quickly,
That there is a different soul living in my skin.
The moon is full again, and I move to the countryside.
New people take me in and feed me kimchi pancakes and sweet potatoes,
Teach me how to play drums and make tea and climb mountains,
Greet me in my mother tongue as I stumble to greet them in theirs.
I walk up to a temple and write my prayers in silence.
My fingernails look like candy corn now, and I want them to grow faster.
I want to grow faster, to skip past the lonely, scary parts,
To be fearless and faultless,
To know everyone and understand everything deeply.
But it’s only autumn, and mine is a slow wish:
To love and to accept love that breaks the borders I once lived within,
To love more boldly and widely, to love with courage in the face of difference and discomfort.
Millions of microscopic parts of me will have to die,
But by some miracle
Millions of new things will grow–
So I will feel my fears and make my mistakes,
And even if it never quite arrives,
I will wait for the first snow.
Cool, wet, dark green,
On the pinky, ring, middle fingers of my left hand,
One on my right hand’s fourth finger.
My friend takes a plastic glove and carefully detaches its fingertips,
Puts them over my nails and wraps twist ties just above my knuckles.
I touch things with caution all afternoon until she tells me I can remove them,
And when I wash my hands my fingertips are a deep tangerine, verging on scarlet,
The color bleeding from my nails out to the skin around them.
When they see my stained hands on their screen, my loved ones squint and say:
What happened to your fingers?
Not Cheetos, not an art project gone awry, I assure them,
I wanted this.
When they see my hands, girls here smile, lean closer and say:
If the color remains until the first snow of winter,
Your wish for love will bloom.
I think of the wishes I grew up making--
Birthday candles, stray eyelashes, shooting stars,
How little patience they required.
This is a slow wish, a wish that grows with time.
The harvest moon comes and goes.
Kind people take me in and give me rice cakes and coffee,
Others walk with me through prisons and protests and camp towns,
They tell me of a pain that I will only ever understand from the outside.
They invite me to listen,
And a crescent of white forms at the bottom of my nail bed
When I go to bed at night, people I love are waking up.
When I sleep, old cells die and new cells form in their place.
I leave crumbs of my DNA in the city’s churches and subways and cafés,
I listen to more stories of past hurt, new hope,
And I see my own hurts and hopes with different eyes.
The white space on my nails grows,
And it feels as if every one of my cells is changing, changing too quickly,
That there is a different soul living in my skin.
The moon is full again, and I move to the countryside.
New people take me in and feed me kimchi pancakes and sweet potatoes,
Teach me how to play drums and make tea and climb mountains,
Greet me in my mother tongue as I stumble to greet them in theirs.
I walk up to a temple and write my prayers in silence.
My fingernails look like candy corn now, and I want them to grow faster.
I want to grow faster, to skip past the lonely, scary parts,
To be fearless and faultless,
To know everyone and understand everything deeply.
But it’s only autumn, and mine is a slow wish:
To love and to accept love that breaks the borders I once lived within,
To love more boldly and widely, to love with courage in the face of difference and discomfort.
Millions of microscopic parts of me will have to die,
But by some miracle
Millions of new things will grow–
So I will feel my fears and make my mistakes,
And even if it never quite arrives,
I will wait for the first snow.