From Blossoms

Lee’s work also continues a literary tradition of adapting theological symbols extending back to the American Transcendentalist Walt Whitman’s 1883 essay “The Bible as Poetry,” as well as to other Romantic and pre-Romantic poets like William Blake and John Milton. Asked about his work’s relationship to immigrant literature in an interview, Lee remarked that the experience of movement and exile

applies to the children of Israel, too. I always thought that trying to find an earthly home was a human condition. It is arrogant of the dominant culture to think it’s not part of a diaspora. My hope is that someone who isn’t Asian American can read it and say, Well, I feel homeless, too (Cheung, King-Kok. Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. U of Hawaii P. 2000. 279).

Having been born in Indonesia and spending his earliest years traveling through Asia before settling in America as a child, Lee associated his exposure through his father to biblical stories of the Jewish people’s wandering in the wilderness with memories of these experiences.

As Lee suggests in his remark that he is “trying to stand neck and neck with Whitman and Melville, or, for that matter, the utterances of Christ in the New Testament, or the epistles of Paul” (Words Matter 278), “From Blossoms” is full of echoes of its literary precursors. Perhaps the most complex of these is the near repetition of the phrase “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” from the Book of Common Prayer, a funeral liturgy. The prayer’s full passage, “we therefore commit this body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life,” itself echoes the book of Genesis. In Genesis 2:7, God creates Adam out of the dust of the earth: “Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (New International Bible, Genesis 2:7, biblica.com/bible/niv/genesis/2). In Genesis 3:19, though, God chastises Adam and Eve for disobeying his commandment by eating the fruit from the tree giving them knowledge of good and evil. Condemning them to a painful mortal existence of toil and hardship, God declares, “by the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread, until you return to the ground—because out of it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (New International Bible, Genesis 3:19, biblica.com/bible/niv/genesis/3). The poem never reproduces the lines from the Book of Common Prayer directly. However, the conspicuous image of dust, combined with repeated phrases using “to” as a connecting word, renders them a background presence, not unlike the orchard the peaches carry within themselves, a memory, or death itself.