Jeju Field

From unmown grasses
drying in early autumn
trill three-note insects.
Short palms shed frayed burlap.

Tiny blue butterflies
dodge gangly dandelions,
trefoil clovers, wild lettuces,
and the claws of small cattails.

Squeaks pinwheel
in the breeze
that sweeps the evergreens
and vines tying hidden snares.

Convict crickets file their cages,
while feathery and hollow
silver-plumed grasses resist
pulling tassels from their sleeves.

A blue farm truck
coughs in the lane frilled
with discarded plastic lids and bags
from the nearby eco-resort.

Christina E. Petrides

From the Central Savannah River Area (CSRA) of Georgia, USA, Christina E. Petrides has lived and worked on Jeju Island, Republic of Korea, since 2017. Her first children's book, Blueberry Man, was published by Tchaikovsky Family Books in 2020; the Korean translation appeared in 2021. More than two score of her poems have been published around the world in the last three years. She co-translated Maria Shelyakhovskaya’s Utverzhdenie v liubvi. Istoria odnoi russkoi sem’i: 1872-1981 (Being Grounded in Love: A History of One Russian Family, 1872-1981), into English manuscript.

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