FEBRUARY 2012: POETRY
by Kristina Erny
- Due to the formatting needs of this month’s poem, it is available as a PDF.
Familiar with being an outsider from her childhood in South Korea, Kristina Erny became interested in dialect, storytelling, language acquisition, spirituality, and community (insiders vs. outsiders) more deeply after spending four months in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 2008. It was here, in this place still suffering from the aftermath of civil war, that she was first introduced to the idea of the Holy Spirit as paraclete, our intercessor, “the one who answers the cry.” What came from the conflict between poverty and the Holy Spirit, love and suffering, musicality, storytelling, pain, and experience were a group of poems. Kristina currently lives and teaches in Daejeon, South Korea, with her husband and two sons.