Picture Bride

How do you leave all that shelters and all that guides for the unknown? When a universe of people and objects are necessary for survival, what come along on the journey. Does a picture say 1,000 words, or still does the distance make lovers strange? Cathy Song writes "Picture Bride" And explores this journey through the eyes of her 23-year old grandmother, a Korean Mail order Bride.

Picture Bride

She was a year younger
than I,
twenty-three when she left Korea.
Did she simply close
the door of her father's house
and walk away. And
was it a long way
through the tailor shops of Pusan
to the wharf where the boat
waited to take her to an island
whose name she had
only recently learned,
on whose shore
a man waited,
turning her photograph
to the light when the lanterns
in the camp outside
Waialua Sugar Mill were lit
and the inside of his room
grew luminous
from the wings of moths
migrating out of the cane stalks?
What things did my grandmother
take with her? and when
she arrived to look
into the face of the stranger
who was her husband,
thirteen years older than she,
did she politely untie
the silk bow of her jacket,
her tent-shaped dress
filling with the dry wind
that blew from the surrounding fields
where the men were burning the cane?