There were two times I heard my father sing. Once from behind the camera, panning to my brother’s birthday cake, his happy birthday a key off, so bad it is valiant, my brother blushing before the table.
The second was at a feast—a mountain village south of Kunming where, my father pointed out, people readied for winter like animals, mixing butter into their tea.
There was something there, his eyes watching the long-haired buffalo graze the cold hills as our little bus wound up and up. His favorite American books were the Little House series, with their descriptions
of simple tasks, how they churned butter from cream. At the dinner, roast lamb, dark pickled flowers, a strong tea, and before long his song: the haunting rise of an attempt at melody,
his voice breaking before it can carry. Somehow they recognize it, the mountain family, and they lean over and whisper “This is a lao jia song,” because we have never heard it
in all these years, we are sitting with strangers trying to imagine what he is mourning.
I recently read Li-Young Lee's "The Undressing," which urges, "And by God, sing! For nothing. Singing / is origin." In this poem, I imagine singing is both origin and survival, a way of holding close what has become distant. When we cannot speak, we sing. And when we cannot sing, we sing.
"Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in memory, and she has made news before. In 2014, she was named the first Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, and three years later she became the country’s first National Youth Poet Laureate."
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"This element of Kurdish delights me: to crack a word open and peer inside it, to find a world within a word, a world where the abstract is embodied. The Kurdish language calls the body into every conversation, fashioning idea from body. There is no hiding the body, not even to protect it."
