Shownotes
Taemong
Kimberly McAfee
After Li-Young Lee*
My mother had a dream of me,
when she and I were one.
She dreamed of a snake
coiled on her belly.
It was her taemong, her conception dream, of me.
How Adam and Eve were so deceived!
A wily snake, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Introducing suffering on this earth.
A snake condemned to writhe about the world on its belly.
I was strange when I was young;
a half-Korean girl in a place with no other Asians or mixed people.
How the other children were so deceived!
I was no gorgon!
I was a human child — just like them.
I once had a dream,
where I warred against an amphisbaena.
One of its heads was bigger than the other,
and I managed to avoid the larger head’s bites, and crushed it with a rake into the earth.
The victory was short-lived,
as the smaller head bit me with vengeance.
I then killed the monster,
but was horribly injured in the process.
The great Cleopatra, ruler of Egypt,
left this world with the bite of an asp.
After I awoke from that strange dream,
successes and failures came,
the pains brought by the striking bites of life.
I became a new creature,
my skin shed to reveal my nature within:
I am a Poet.
I writhe about on my belly,
hunting for experiences,
hunting for words, to birth creations.
Satiating the hunger within.
My dream.
Could this be what the taemong foretold?
*Inspired in part by Li-Young Lee’s poem titled, Water. It is part of his debut poetry collection, The Rose.
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