What would Harry Holt Do?
Here is the awesome spoken word, by permission of the author, poet Christy Namee Ericksen.
Please support the work of Christy and other poets of color by purchasing their collective CD, of which this poem is part of. You can purchase it here.
(You can listen to her spoken word by following the link below which takes you to another page)
(or, you can try wordpress’s audio player below so you can read along, but it takes a year to load)
And here’s my transcription:
What Would Harry Holt Do?
Everyone knows what Harry Holt would do:
as a businessman
who wanted to be a hero,
as a father
who wanted more;
as a Christian
with connections.
Well I want to know:
What would Harry Holt do
if he knew about all the good Korean adoptee Christians
that are hooking up all over this town?
What would Harry Holt do
if Buddhist black people started to adopt in thousands?
Or if suburban white babies were being left at Lunds & Byerlies?
What would Harry Holt do
if all the adoptees knew a song,
and the song was, “How much is that baby in the window?”
and at night we could look through our story on the bookshelf –
see the letters, see the bills; see how much it cost our parents
to buy us.
What would Harry Holt do?
What would Harry Holt do
if Korea had to shut down general operations in the summer,
just to handle the influx of adoptees –
the migration of Koreans from all these continents –
back to the land they were taken from:
looking for their roots, looking for their mothers; looking for their answers?
What would Harry Holt do
if our birth-mothers wanted to write us a letter,
but they didn’t know what Korean name the orphanage gave us,
or they didn’t know how to spell the American name they heard about,
or they didn’t know how to write Roman letters?
How would they start?
How would he start to tell them?
What would Harry Holt do
if all the Korean mothers started to cry one night,
beginning at sunset and ending at sunrise,
in the corner of each of their homes,
in the quiet of each of their secrets,
under the floors of the floors of the floors of their stories?
And their tears were so many
that they began to flow into the streets
of Seoul, of Busan, of Daegu.
And the country woke up to a new river
that everyone saw,
but no one talked about;
that sparkled like wishing stars
but filled everyone with sadness.
What would Harry Holt do?
What would Harry Holt do
if a Korean mother
and a Korean daughter
could only understand each other
if a white woman missionary from Utah translated?
What would Harry Holt do
when the only thing adoptees can really call their own from Korea
is their Korean name,
tattoo’d on their bodies somewhere,
and they can’t even read it?
What would Harry Holt do
if Korea made a new reality t.v. show,
still about Korean adoptee reunions,
but this time all the adoptees
are reunited — with him?
What would Harry Holt do
with the stress of 200,000 questions?
What would Harry Holt do
with the results of a customer service survey?
What would Harry Holt do
if we started to write our own research?
What would Harry Holt do
with all the prayers
young adoptees whisper
to Harry Holt’s God?
With all the wishes burnt on birthday candles,
all the letters sent to Santa
asking, requesting, begging for
whiter skin or bigger eyes or less flat face or
to be Megan Nelson or Camile Jarvis or
Heidi Farrington, who’s a little chubby
but everyone still likes her.
That’d be all right.
What would Harry Holt do
about love?
When money turns to shame
and an Iowa man beats his four Korean adopted children to death
with a baseball bat.
What would Harry Holt do
about love?
When things change
and a child loses their shine,
when a Dutch couple visits Korea,
picks up a daughter,
and returns her to the orphanage seven years later.
What would Harry Holt do
about love?
When adoptees are saving their allowance
for surgery to cut a fold in their eyelids,
when they’re only dating color-blind white men
who have a thing for Asians;
when they’re holding their own
grown
mother
in their arms,
as she breaks?
What would Harry Holt do
about love?
When their families
don’t want to hear about it anymore?
Don’t want to hear about it anymore.
You were never our Korean child,
you were just our child.
What would Harry Holt do then?
And what would Harry Holt do now?
To save us?
