Grace
Ed Bok Lee

I have a friend, who, in her spare time, bakes
muffins & scones & delivers them to workers on strike—
bus drivers, nurses, machinists—she believes
anyone who demonstrates peacefully for their rights should be
rewarded at least with unexpected sweets.
She tries her best to use fair trade ingredients
& decides what kind of cookies to make based on the weather forecast. 

Sometimes when I look up from my phone or journal,
& it sounds like all the birds above me are also bickering,
& even poetry feels glued to the news of yet another war or shooting
of school kids, or Black people, or, last weekend,
two of our state legislators & their spouses, 
shot in their pajamas— 

I try also to remember my old neighbor Duane, how still
to this day, I hear, he clears the snow & ice
off everyone’s sidewalk on the block, often in the dark.
How this retiree still won’t take a cent.
This is how he dissents against the slum lord
across the way who now collects nearly twice the market value in rent. 

Some people are like the wind, sweeping up leaves
& chip bags, cigarette butts & news pages, into little swirls
across & away from our sacred sites & schools.   

And I know, every tree has a face.
And on every last gravestone, there is no time or space for race.
And the highest class is kindness hauling determination on its back. 
And war is a fungus in the heart.
And some days, when you can’t even dance, or meditate, or pray,
it's okay to bake or shovel, or just picnic with pie
& each our own personal dragonfly.

The poet e.e. cummings has a line that breaks
through from somewhere deep inside me every spring:
“No one has such small hands as the rain.”

I believe we know almost nothing about the rain.
In a world of bombs falling, I believe, for all our science,
we’ve learned more about aliens than rainbows. 

My daughter’s teacher from when she was in pre-school
hangs a rainbow flag over their family’s front door.
On some gray days it whips violently in the wind.
Other afternoons, the slack flag is just chilling in the sun
like any tongue after a love poem. 

Some people think the colorful flag outside their home means just one thing
& rev loud engines past.
They don’t seem to believe that a rainbow in any form—cloth
or vapor—is not just a symbol, but a visitation.
And no arc of color in it is rage.
And every arc of color in it is soft as a sage. 

I have a friend, Eunjeong, whose American name is Grace.
She oversees her neighborhood’s community garden.  
After they immigrated when she was four years old,
her parents debated long & hard whether to make her name in America
        Joy or Faith. 
For her 9 to 5 job, she drives around with a team
that prunes & plants trees, & landscapes.

No one has such small hands as the rain—
except Grace, & all the poems hidden
inside her tomatoes, ggaenip, & O my god,
Grace’s strawberries!