Sono

Out of albumen and blood, out of amniotic brine,

placental sea-swell, trough, salt-spume and foam,

you came to us infinitely far, little traveler, from the other world –

skull-keel and heel-hull socketed to pelvic cradle,

rib-rigging, bowsprit-spine, driftwood-bone,

the ship of you scudding wave after wave of what-might-never-have- been.

Memory, stay faithful to this moment, which will never return:

may I never forget when we first saw you, there on the other side,

still fish-gilled, water-lunged,

your eelgrass-hair and seahorse-skeleton floating in the sonogram screen

like a ghost from tomorrow,

moth-breath quicksilver in snowy pixels, fists in sleep-twitch,

not yet alive but not not,

you who were and were not,

a thunder of bloodbeats sutured in green jags on the ultrasound machine

like hooves galloping from eternity to time,

feet kicking bone-creel and womb-wall,

while we waited, never to waken in that world again,

the world without the shadow of your death,

with no you or not-you, no is or was or might-have-been or never-were.

May I never forget when I first saw you in your after-life

which was life,

soaked otter-pelt and swan-down crowning,

face cauled in blood and mucous-mud, eyes soldered shut,

wet birth-cord rooting you from one world to the next,

you who might not have lived, might never have been born, like all the others,

as we looked at every pock and crook of your skull,

every clotted hair, seal-slick on your blue-black scalp,

every lash, every nail, every pore, every breath,

with so much wonder that wonder is not the word –



As South Korea celebrates Seollal, the lunar new year, we welcome the Korean-American writer Suji Kwock Kim with a poetic song of gestation and birth. Sono takes up a theme Kim introduced in the five-part sequence, Generation, which opens her award-winning 2003 collection Notes from the Divided Country.

Generation begins in “the unborn world”, with the ancestral children of the speaker’s family summoned to a dramatic, reluctantly undertaken voyage, running, flying, swimming “over oceans of dream-salt” into existence. The fourth section ends: “Out of chromosomes and dust, / cells of hope, cells of history, / out of refugees running from mortar shells, immigrants driving to power plants in Jersey, / out of meadowsweet and oil, the chaff of unlived lives blowing endlessly, / out of wishes known and unknown they reeled me in.” And, in the fifth section, the speaker herself is the unborn child, travelling the changeable continent of the mother’s body, foetal “heart ticking like a bomb – is-was, is-was”.

To read the more recent poem, Sono, is to recall those voyages into exile, perilous but also thrilling. Birth is a fantastical bodily adventure, as in Generation, with driving rhythms and an abundance of marine and nautical images swirling together: the placenta as “sea-swell”, the child in the form of a strangely made ship. Its metaphors loosely held together, the poem overrides biology with the spectacular shapeshifting of the animated movie. Its hero is an extraordinary being, formed from a menagerie of creatures, “still fish-gilled”, with “eelgrass hair”, “seahorse skeleton” and exhaling “snowy pixels” of “moth-breath”. And then, all at once the mythical creature is grounded: from a mysterious image on the ultrasound screen, emerges a recognisable human infant, “fists in sleep-twitch”.

The fantastical journey hasn’t ended yet, though: “a thunder of bloodbeats sutured in green jags on the ultrasound machine / like hooves galloping from eternity to time” transforms the impersonal sophistication of sonograph technology, conjuring cyborg-horses racing across the universe.

What I find particularly moving is the interwoven commentary, the unassuming, meditative, sometimes reverential voice of a kind of Greek chorus, emphasising the whole unlikelihood of existence. In the mythic pre-birth world, this particular child “might never have been born, like all the others”. Parenthood’s scary vulnerability is sharply registered, but, more than this, it represents irreversible citizenship of another country – “we waited / never to waken in that world again, / the world without the shadow of your death”. As if echoing the invocation to the muse of classical western poetry, the speaker calls on her own mental powers: “Memory, stay faithful to this moment, which will never return” and, in the beautiful 11th couplet, “May I never forget when I first saw you in your after-life / which was life.” This haunting idea of life as afterlife, and the conception of a pre-birth world connects, perhaps, with the traditional concept of life-after-death and continuing ancestral presence.

The poem itself is a process of giving birth, and the baby’s physical actuality is registered most fully in the penultimate stanza, where the parents witness the “crowning” of the head, the new hair “seal-slick on your blue black scalp” and the little, birth-soiled face with “eyes soldered shut”. Now the child, all along addressee of the poem, is fully present. Following the entranced gaze of the new parents, we watch them study “every lash, every nail, every pore, every breath”. And so the poet-mother begins her performative task: she remembers.

While a less specifically political poem than many others by Kim, Sono is a treatment of birth, whose disruption and transition inevitably mirrors historical events. A large vision of hope, too, is implied: in the cell-splitting by which the embryo forms; in pregnancy’s turbulent animated cinema of dreams; in the enthralling sonogram that reunites mother and father and where the new family unit is first made flesh; in labour and birth, and in the presence of the new being, who rouses “so much wonder that wonder is not the word”. How mysterious and right that this apparent retraction (“not the word”) shows us that wonder is indeed the word!

• Sono has been published in Southword, the Irish Examiner and Best American Poetry 2018, and will be included in Suji Kwock Kim’s next collection, Disorient.