Hana Widerman
Winter 2024 | Poetry
Three Poems
The Drive That Never Ends
Why can’t what happened to Aeneas
in the underworld happen to a daughter
and her father, between two brothers.
Take mourning away from the language
of epic, deal in our daily vernacular.
Give us three attempted embraces
with the person we love but can no longer
reach. A year ago driving through
the mountains of Oregon, my father
called out to the brother he hadn’t seen
in decades. Stanley. Stanley. Stanley. He’s here,
we need to pick him up. My father didn’t stop
until fifty miles had passed, until we had left
the snow behind. All I could do
was drive while he yelled. I couldn’t
show my father my face. What do you call
this kind of grief? We cannot see all the ghosts.
Elegy Haiku
Because I had not
written a poem about
my father until
years later, I felt
I had failed him. Miso soup
with tofu and green
onions, rice and
pickled plum, it's easier
to find elegy
in the way I slide
a strand of my mother's hair
out of food before
she sees. My father
and his elegies, they turn
elusive like his
breath in the cold that
first time he wandered away,
falling fast asleep
under an unknown
tree during a Seattle
fall. I am asking
how to make this hurt
less. My father, every tree
I will ever see.
Atlas Dialogue: Winter
Snow dilates
throughout this evening
and falls so slowly.
My desire reaches full diameter
though I don’t know its object.
I’m chasing weight like a feminized Atlas.
This is the only way I know
how to love. I become a mountain range.
I remain a feeling being.
Atlas, despite all your power, we’re the same.
How you accepted punishment
and stayed.
Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, Hana Widerman is a poet originally from California. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English and Creative Writing and won the James Richardson Award in Poetry. She is currently an MFA student at Cornell University, where she was the 2024 recipient of the George Harmon Coxe Poetry Prize and a poetry editor of EPOCH. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming The Journal, The Threepenny Review, The Washington Square Review, The Offing, and elsewhere.