My Housemate Bows a Thousand Times for Geun-Ae Park Sharon Cumberland It’s what they do at her Korean temple when something is amiss with the spirit: kneel, bend head to rug, lift hands palms up then stand again, like a river flowing backward, before falling forward once more on your knees in a smooth wave. She will do this a thousand times to expiate the anger in her breast at her professor, who makes her work long hours in the laboratory who shouts at her, takes credit for her research—the man she tries not to hate. If she bows a thousand times he will shrink in the waves of worship that wash her soul. It takes twelve hours to bow away the man who tries to bend her to his will. I had a lovely woman from South Korea living in my house for several years who was a post-doctoral student in Climatology at the University of Washington. She worked in a laboratory that was supervised by a professor, also from South Korea, who was very demanding and hard on her. My housemate didn’t speak English very well, but she faithfully attended a Buddhist temple in the Pure Land tradition, and told me that she was going to go there on a special day and bow 1,000 times. She showed me this bow, which was quite athletic and graceful, as I hope I’ve described in the poem. To do it so many times (and she has since done it THREE thousand times) is an amazing form of devotional practice. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Sharon Cumberland is a professor of English and the director of creative writing at Seattle University. Her poetry collections are Peculiar Honors (Black Heron Press), Greatest Hits 1985-2000 (Pudding House Press), and The Arithmetic of Mourning (Green Rock Press). Her next collection, “Strange with Age,” is forthcoming from Black Heron Press in 2014.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 22:34:26 +0000
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