On Holding by Hyejung Kook
By Janice Northerns
Hello. This is Janice Northerns, coming to you from Wichita, Kansas, for Poets on the Plains. Today, I’m reading a poem by Hyejung Kook called Holding, which is about a singular moment during the pandemic. Hyejung Kook’s first full-length poetry collection will be published in 2027. She lives in Prairie Village, Kansas, and while her work is relatively new to me, I am already a big fan.
Holding
Today my daughter
and I walked to the edge
of the retaining pond
down the street
the first time she
has left the house
since a week ago
when she fevered
and coughed and we
stared at her sample
slowly wicking up
the white candle
of a test strip and
a single pink line
came into focus
still we quarantined
masked and isolated
but being outside
we could bare our faces
to each other again
and she said look
look and my breath caught
beneath the leaf-studded
iced-over surface
of the pond vibrant
unexpected orange
at least a dozen koi
alert and swimming
in the dead of winter
sensing our approach
with a few measured flicks
of their white fins
the bright flames
of their bodies
disappeared
into murky gray water
and suddenly
I remembered
that I could breathe
Holding is used with permission.
One thing you may notice about this poem if you read it on the page is the absence of punctuation marks. The author doesn’t use any. It can be risky to skip those commas and periods because you’re removing signals that help readers understand the meaning. But in Holding, the lack of punctuation serves to emphasize the mood of the poem—it is a single event that begins with tension, a long, breath-holding moment.
In that long moment of the poem, there are a couple of passages I’d like to talk about. The author describes looking at the Covid test results with these words:“we stared at her sample slowly wicking up the white candle of a test strip.” This is such a lovely, unexpected metaphor. It takes us by surprise because it makes us see beauty in an activity that we associate with fear and dread. You can even think of it as a bit of foreshadowing for the positive turn the poem takes in its closure.
And I love how the image of the candle is recalled for us in the “bright flames” of the fish swimming away. If we think about these two images together, the first one is a delicate glimpse of hope: the “sample slowly wicking up the white candle” and its accompanying “single pink line” that signals a negative test result. The second image—“the bright flames” of the fish—is the fulfillment of that faint hope with outright joy.
The title of this poem, Holding, is doing good work, too. Mother and daughter are caught in a holding pattern during the Covid pandemic, as we all were. They’ve been trapped in the house and trapped behind masks, and they come to the iced-over pond in the “dead of winter,” a season of stasis.
But beneath the ice, they find the koi, who break that holding pattern for the mother in a delightful way, as she remembers she no longer has to hold her breath.
When I think of the word “holding,” I also think of a mother holding her child and the way that holding can mean protecting. As parents, there are so many things we try to protect our children from that it can feel like a long stretch of holding your breath, and this was even more true during the pandemic. And so, the poet’s relief at the end of the poem is a feeling that we can identify with and celebrate.
This is Janice Northerns in Wichita, Kansas, for Poets on the Plains, wishing you all bright flames of joy.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award from the University of Kansas, the Kansas Authors Club Nelson Poetry Book Award, anda WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in Texas and holds degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Creative Writing Award. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. After living in southwest Kansas for 25 years, she and her husband moved to Wichita in 2023. She is active in the local chapter of the Kansas Authors Club and presents workshops locally and at the state level. Learn more on her website: www.janicenortherns.com
FEATURED POET
Hyejung Kook’s poetry has appeared in Poem-a Day POETRY, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Other works include essays in The Critical Flame and Poetry as Spellcasting (North Atlantic Books, 2023) and a chamber opera libretto. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Once Is Not Enough, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in Fall 2027. Hyejung holds a B.A. from Harvard and an MFA from NYU. Born in Seoul, she now lives in Prairie Village, Kansas. She is a Fulbright grantee and co-editor of Barahm Press. Learn more at hyejungkook.tumblr.com.
