On the creation of the video: Li-Young Lee's "From Blossoms" provides a landscape in which everything and anything is possible. For me, it brings me back to very specific memories of my childhood summers—sweating, running, swinging, eating, dreaming. I felt invincible and carefree. It can be hard to return to that place, but this poem activates it through so many of the senses. With this video, I wanted to pay homage to that feeling of hope and growth and renewal.
"From Blossoms"
by Li-Young Lee
rom blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
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Jennifer Huang is a Taiwanese-American writer and artist, who prefers to work in verse. Her poems have appeared in The Blueshift Journal, tenderness yea, and The Oakland Review, amongst others. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor at Sundog Lit and lives somewhere between her mind and the horizon.