My Poetry Corner January 2025 features the poem “Truths” from the poetry collection Scar and Flower (USA, 2019) by poet Lee Herrick, the first Asian American to serve as the tenth California Poet Laureate (2022-2024). Born in 1970 in Daejeon, South Korea, he was adopted at ten months old by an American couple. He grew up in Northern California where he attended Modesto Junior College and received his BA in English and MA in Composition and Rhetoric from the California State University, Stanislaus.

He lives with his wife and daughter in Fresno, Northern California, where he is an English professor at Fresno City College since 1997. He also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.

“Adoption is seen through Hollywood’s lens as purely and essentially as a blessing and a gift. Which in some way may be true, however adoption is also wrapped in trauma,” Herrick told Sara Ohler during an interview in May 2023 for The Rampage literary magazine.

Though blessed with a warm and loving family, he was struck with anxiety in 1989, during his senior year in high school and throughout most of college. Growing up among family members in the creative arts—his mother is a visual artist—he found relief in music and poetry. “You kind of just had to make do or things weren’t very helpful,” Herrick said. “‘Handle your business or be a man,’ so the arts and music was a great outlet for me.”

“Adoption has offered me a heightened sense of race and difference and nuance,” Herrick told Rebecca Evans during their December 2018 interview for The Normal School Literary Magazine. “And being raised in a white family, I’m able to see people and the questions I grew up with about myself and the world. This gives me a true interest in individual experiences.”

He further added that his third book, Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award, is his first overtly political book. “My passion and long-standing interests in social justice merged with the events in the world. I found myself writing about guns and mass shootings, along with poems about my daughter, and walks along the beach. At some point, I realized, this is about balance. It was also about trauma, how people regulate the impact of life-altering events. How they navigate through and, eventually, reach the other side.”

Scar, the first section of the collection with 29 poems, is about mass shootings, like Newtown, the topic of his poem “What I Hear After the Massacre and What I Mistake For My Heart” (p. 14). On December 14, 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Invisible birds shocked out of the trees
and you mistake them for children
on the playground, or you mistake the leaves
cracked underfoot for the children’s hush
or broken glass. It’s a maelstrom.
At the Winter Program, the first graders
sing “Let It Snow” and the parents clasp
their hands, half exhale, half prayer.
The children sing in your town and you
think of the children in the shattered town.
All that comes to you is their hearts, heaven,
hell, and the next kind word you will say to a boy.

In “Fatigue” (p. 18), the poet expresses my own frustration and shared pain with our unwillingness and inability to end gun violence across our nation. Why? Why? Why?

The mother cries into her black tea. / The mother weeds in the small yard.
The father cries into his old tea, / tries to bring his son back to life, wonders
why again, why the gun, why the cop, / why the fire, where’s the rain,
why the gun, why the gun, / why the hole, in the head, in the dream
why theater, why the school grounds, / why headline, why sonnet,
why ammunition, why the acquittal, / why the killer can’t hear the doves
why the boy cannot run with a hood / why some men craft hate with theirs
why again, why the gun, why the cop / where’s the out, where’s the cry
why the tie, why the tale, / why the black, why the brown,
why again, why we die, / why the sun go down like this.

In the poem “Rose” (p. 20), the scar and flower become one. At the New York Botanical Garden, the poet remembers Orlando, Florida, where 29-year-old Omar Mateen, on June 12, 2016, shot and killed 49 people and wounded 53 more in a mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub.

Tell me, rose, about root, soil, wilt. / I’m stealing a petal, and I know it’s a crime. I want the petal to fly from this botanical / garden to Orlando, where I cannot place a rose / on any altar but where I imagine forty-nine roses / near a swamp in a park where even small children know, don’t terrorize the birds! Let no person deliver / terror in a park, in a school, in a dance club, no / terror in a dance club. I want to be quiet. / The roses admit they don’t know why they bloom. / But they do. The rose, its pulse, doing its loveliness / in a time of disaster, dancing like the world was on fire.

The featured 26-verse poem “Truths” (pp. 63-64) is from the second section Flower, comprised of 22 poems. Herrick opens this poem with an epigraph from the American poet Philip Levine (1928-2015) who taught for more than thirty years in the English Department of California State University, Fresno: “Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true, they must be said without elegance.” With his gracious vision of the world, Herrick brings Levine’s insight into our individual and shared experiences.

In these times of a post-truth world, where misinformation and disinformation assail us on all sides, it is of vital importance that we do not lose sight of these simple truths that we all share and experience as humans.

I will say it like this: I watched my daughter bite into a peach,
and although she did not have the language for it yet,
I imagined her thinking, that taste, that perfect juice,
is heavenly. There was a certain light in Fresno that day,
like today, where we work and dream—
Mayor and mothers, farmers and fathers, laborers
in blue collars and donors for the red wave,
one city of multiple truths straight down the 99
dreaming about the perfect peach, the perfect pitch,
one city in the shape of an immigrant’s beautiful accent,
one city of taco, gyro, pan dulce, and strawberries
so good, you’d swear they came straight from the hand of God,
one city, in my dream, where there are no gunshots tonight…

Fresno, located in the San Joaquin Valley of California, is the largest city in the greater Central Valley region of large-scale production of diverse crops, including grains, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. It’s the fifth most-populous city in California, with the third-largest Hispanic/Latino population in the United States. It is also home to minority Armenian and Hmong (East Asian) communities. The city sits at the junction of Highways 41 and 99 that link the city with the Yosemite National Park and other urban centers of the region.

[...] My truths involve dreams,
stars, hard work and good pay for the ice worker, the tractor
driver, the backyard gardener, the students and the teachers,
the nurses and the preachers. The fog on a country road—
that is the truth. Our menacing heat in July—truth.
My city is your city, a bead of sweat and the will
to work, the want for clean air, for water,
for a moment of grace in the shade.

To read the complete featured poem and learn more about the work of Korean American poet Lee Herrick, go to my Poetry Corner January 2025.