Jill

About me:

The Making of Myths and Legends

If anything, we could thank you
for not being relative.
You could make any truth
see through the dark of you.
Stories built of nothing grand,
just daily misgivings—
not craft, not art—
mislaid and taken up ,
like the memories you couldn't wait
to make of us—
the accumulation of everything alterable—
the photographs we already are
in your frozen mind
not cold from weather
but habit.



Just To Make Sure

It is funny now

that we look back

at how foolish we've been,

to be better than we are capable of becoming.

Like the people we believed

but afterwards reviled for letting ourselves believe them.

The worst is when we could never choose to love.

For example, a mother or a father who isn't your mother or father at all.

We who have been thanking them all our lives

now thank them for being the people they really are―

human like we are,

only less to themselves as we all are to the others who live in us,

those beautiful strangers

we never get to be

now laughing along with us.



Thanksgiving

Sometimes we thank You
for no reason at all.
A life is a reason to be thankful—
how they sometimes take for granted
the things You've given us.
We are all that.
We are Your making.

Some learn this too late.
They continue to want
the people they love
to live and die for them,
forgetting they themselves
may never be able to live again
though they breathe.

Because in this other dying,
they know to breathe,
having taken so much that is Yours
that is never theirs.




I'm a poet and editor.

My third collection, These Hands Are Not Ours (ESAW, 2009), has just won the Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize.


For more details, visit the official website: http://www.jillchan.net

All poems on this profile and blog Copyright © Jill Chan. All Rights Reserved. For your private and personal reading only. Copying, reproducing, saving, reprinting, or reposting in any medium, electronic or otherwise, is strictly prohibited.