AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "TRUTHS" BY CALIFORNIA POET LAUREATE LEE HERRICK



LEE HERRICK is a Korean American poet and English professor. In 2022, he was appointed the tenth poet laureate of California for two years by Governor Gavin Newson. He is the first Asian American to serve in this role.


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 a professor in the English Department at Fresno City College. He also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. He has also taught in Qingdao, China, and for Kundiman in New York City, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature.


Herrick is the author of four books of poems: In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems (2024), Scar and Flower (2019), finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award, Gardening Secrets of the Dead (2012), and This Many Miles from Desire (2007). He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (2020) and Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing (2023). His poems have been published widely in literary magazines and anthologies.


From 2015 to 2017, he served as Fresno Poet Laureate. In 2016, he co-founded LitHop, an annual pop-up literary arts festival based in Fresno. He serves on the Advisory Board of The Adoption Museum Project, Terrain.org, and Sixteen Rivers Press.


Photo Credit: Kathy Bonilla of Fresno City College

Visit Poet’s Official Website at www.leeherrick.com



TRUTHS BY LEE HERRICK



"Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true, they must be said without elegance."

— Philip Levine


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




TRUTHS BY LEE HERRICK continued



or the next one hundred starlit nights, one simple truth

called the fig tree, the ash tree, one poet's testimony

stripped of its elegance for the city to consider:

in which of our ninety languages should I say that I love you?

Which of our two hundred and fifty different crops would you like

to taste, to imagine its perfect juice? 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.



SOURCE: Scar and Flower: Poems by Lee Herrick, published by Word Poetry, Ohio, USA, 2019, pp. 63-64.