Jung Hae Chae’s poem is both an exquisite lyric and an incisive meditation on race and belonging. A must-read.
—
The Moon Over the Verrazano Bridge
The moon over the Verrazano Bridge
is not the same as the moon over
the Tappan Zee or the Brooklyn Bridge.
The moon over the Verrazano Bridge
is not as star-spangled or first-class
as the moon over the Golden Gate. Nor
is it as continentally beautiful but
tragic as the Ponte Vecchio or the Stari Most.
The moon over the Verrazano Bridge
does not hang low enough to be the moon
over the Mekong River or even the Han River,
or any number of rivers in Asia, be it East
or Southeast, aka, Asiatic, Oriental, Mongolian
or any other name known to my neighbors.
By the same token, the moon over
the Verrazano Bridge does not come
close to being the moon over our backyard.
And for that matter, the moon over the Verrazano Bridge
does not compare. But if I had to, the moon over
the Verrazano Bridge lies somewhere between
The Wind and The Rain, if they were crossings
or lovers, or is it like the Outermost Bridge, wherever
that bridge might be found? The moon over the Verrazano
Bridge is the moon that I see when I look up
from traffic on my way home, look out to the body
of water, or is it mountains that part the South
from the North, that cuts the rhythm of you
& I into you vs. I, but that sometimes stops
my breath for no good reason, that
feels like my mother tongue even though
I’m all about business in Indo-European?
It’s the moon over the hard-to-pronounce,
four-syllable bridge of questionable ancestry,
the most expensive-toll-crossing-in-the-cosmos
bridge because it just is. The unwieldy, the un-
called-for, the unaccounted-for, the neither-here-nor-there
Bridge. That bridge, that moon.
***
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