It’s been forty years since you died resisting Korea’s division.

I am spending the summer of '88 here on the island with my grandmother

where tobacco-chewing 아저씨 sell red bean popsicles and melon ice cream

beneath hagyul trees and hiking enthusiasts climb Mount Hallasan.

I wander the beaches where since the Dark Ages pearl divers

have held their breath and submerged themselves in the Pacific,

retrieved what they found to sell or eat to keep their families alive.

When I grow tired of 오징어, abalone and rice

my grandmother finds a place that sells American food

and I gorge on pizza and plain hamburgers, tiny cans of Sprite

which Koreans always sip with a straw,

but I pour down my throat like an American.

From our room at the Hyatt I drift to sleep each night

as my grandmother says her Christian prayers aloud in the bed next to me,

as the lily-scented warm wind outside my open window

perfumes my dreams of silver boats floating near the horizon.

I know only a few phrases in Korean:

that hurts/ may I please have strawberries/ I don’t understand.

My grandmother knows only hello and goodbye, yes and no.

One day I teach her to say fish but because in Korean there is no letter “f,”

it sounds like peesh. When I giggle at her she says it again

and we go on like that for a while, me trying to teach her

and she saying pish, peesh, pish, both of us laughing

until our eyes brim with saltwater.

Today, a guide leads tourists by Doteul cave.

In 1948 you hid here for sixty days, decided you’d had enough of war,

mostly farmers caught between sides, determined

to no longer belong to anyone but each other.

Ghosts of Jeju: if you could speak and I could understand you,

what would you say? Would you say hello, say it hurts, say pish

over and over until the boats cross the horizon, until I dream myself

into the cave where your moon-white bones stand together still,

in our still-divided country, wailing, roaring NO in every language.