Infant Longing
Because to God must be given the things that belong to God, and to the world must be given the things that belong to the world, I kiss you with both lips, upper and lower.
Because the world keeps beginning and ending the same way, with the slaughter of the innocent, with the massacre of the blameless, and there's not a thing anyone can do.
O, who will roll the stone from the mouth of the tomb for us?
I kiss you thus, because the world ended with my mother walking among the slaughtered to find her own.
I kiss you thus, because the world began with my mother finding among the slaughtered her own and burying them.
And when I was hungry and crying in her arms, she stopped my mouth with her breast, and she fed me her longing at the end of the world.
And when I wouldn't stop crying in her arms, she bared her other breast to my mouth, and she fed me her longing at the beginning of the world.
It's like you kissing my mouth to seal my mouth.
Like you kissing my mouth to open my mouth.
Like you kissing my mouth to open my eyes.
Like you kissing my mouth to close my eyes.
What's the difference between these kisses?
Who will roll the stone from the mouth of the tomb for us? The round stone. The square tomb.
When we kiss, when the upper and lower in me meet the upper and lower in you, when what is high is humbled and what is low is raised, when the round stone of time is rolled away from the square space of earth, you and I see what comes before the beginning and after the end: an infinite longing moving over the face of the deep.
This poem has been excerpted from Li-Young Lee's forthcoming book, I Ask My Mother to Sing.
Article originally published at The Atlantic
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