Cathy Song

Cathy Song Poems

Cathy Song Biography

Cathy Song (born Cathy-Lynn Song; August 20, 1955) is an American poet. She is the 1982 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her collection Picture Bride. Personal life Song was born in Wahiawa, Hawaii. She is the second of three children born to Ella, an immigrant from China who was a seamstress, and Andrew Song, a Korean American airline pilot. Song's father and grandfather both had arranged marriages. They corresponded solely through photographs and were married when their wives came to the United States a few years later. In 1962, when she was 7 years old, the family relocated to Honolulu. Song graduated from Wellesley College with a bachelor's degree in 1977 and from Boston University in 1981 with a master's degree in Creative Writing. While living in Boston, she married Douglas Davenport, then a physician-in-training. In 1984, they moved to Colorado for Davenport's medical training and settled back to Hawaii in 1987. The couple have three children and now reside in Kahala, Hawaii. Career Song was associated with the Hawaii literary journal Bamboo Ridge from its early days in 1978, and continues to collaborate with writers from that community. Her first book of poetry, Picture Bride (1983), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. In choosing Song's first book for the Yale Series, Richard Hugo wrote, "Her poems are flowers: colorful, sensual, and quiet, and they are offered almost shyly as bouquets to those moments in life that seemed minor but in retrospect count the most. She often reminds a loud, indifferent, hard world of what truly matters to the human spirit." In 1993, Song won the Hawaii Award for Literature. That same year, the Poetry Society of America awarded Song the Shelley Memorial Award. In the early fall of 1994, she was invited to travel to Korea and Hong Kong under the United States Information Agency's Arts America program. In 1997, Song was one of the recipients of the annual Literature Awards ($20,000), awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts.)

The Best Poem Of Cathy Song

Waterwings

The mornings are his,
blue and white
like the tablecloth at breakfast.
He's happy in the house,
a sweep of the spoon
brings the birds under his chair.
He sings and the dishes disappear.

Or holding a crayon like a candle,
he draws a circle.
It is his hundredth dragonfly.
Calling for more paper,
this one is red-winged
and like the others,
he wills it to fly, simply
by the unformed curve of his signature.

Waterwings he calls them,
the floats I strap to his arms.
I wear an apron of concern,
sweep the morning of birds.
To the water he returns,
plunging where it's cold,
moving and squealing into sunlight.
The water from here seems flecked with gold.

I watch the circles
his small body makes
fan and ripple,
disperse like an echo
into the sum of water, light and air.
His imprint on the water
has but a brief lifespan,
the flicker of a dragonfly's delicate wing.

This is sadness, I tell myself,
the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind,
because he will not remember
that he and beauty were aligned,
skimming across the water, nearly airborne,
on his first solo flight.
I'll write "how he could not
contain his delight."
At the other end,
in another time frame,
he waits for me—
having already outdistanced this body,
the one that slipped from me like a fish,
floating, free of itself.

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