Karen An-Hwei Lee
for Edith Piaf


Je vois la vie en rose    Little sparrow
I see morpheus blooms               A girl dead

of meningitis     Des mots de tous les jours 
grand-mère’s ill repute            Night women

My acrobatic père            Quelque chose 
Paranoia or criminality?

Night women        Who closed our house
To pray when I went blind as a girl

Une part de bonheur    Erstwhile mère
under a streetlight         To birth me or not

Et dès que je l’aperçois               Women prayed
Miracle              Healed yet how was my heart

         Bestowed on strangers like you
des yeux qui font baisser les miens
 
Alors je sens en moi      Dancing algebraic
shards not only in the auto crash

broken along with my bones

Sing morpheus blooms and the final
hymne, hymne, hymne to love

                                                         Mon coeur qui bat 

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she lives and teaches in Southern California, where she is a novice harpist. She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.