After Watching Minari

By Samuel Son

H

ere, we have a story

that doesn’t live happily ever

after but goes on, nevertheless.

We don’t know exactly

what happened to grandma, only

she is with them like voices in leaves.

All we know is that the family

broke but didn't scatter,

this time the husband and wife

looking for water

together, this time they walk

with their only friend Peter,

a cross carrying Pentecostal

who shakes like a Shaman, 

staking out water with a tree branch, 

husband and wife walking the land,

like the ancestors in the other side

of Pacific they can never remember.

At the end scene, the father is plucking

out minari, a Korean vegetable grandma

seeded in the wild, and without anyone

tending to it, growing, claiming their

part of the soil and sun and river.

Photo Courtesy A24.

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Samuel Son is the Manager of Diversity at Presbyterian Mission Agency, a pastor at PCUSA (Presbyterian Church of USA). His poems and essays have appeared in American Journal of Poetry, MadCrab Journal, Tuck Magazine, the RavenFoundation, Mockingbird, Sojourner and others. You can follow his writings at https://medium.com/@sonsamuel