Lee Herrick

I think it's hard to capture the grandeur of the game and the World Cup in a poem, but that's kind of what poetry is about.

The difficulty and complexity and exhilaration of those moments of joy that can occur.

I've been writing poetry for most of my life.

And then in late 2022, I was appointed by California's governor to serve as California Poet Laureate.

I always felt like a little bit of an outsider having these two loves, poetry and soccer, here in the US.

In my mind, they've always merged.

With me, language, the imagination, creativity, joy,

Those are things that I think of with poetry as much as soccer and football that can result in a poem or a goal.

So to me, there are all kinds of parallels.

You know, I was born in South Korea and I was adopted to the United States when I was less than one year old.

So I didn't spend much time in the country.

But I think that one thing that soccer or football can do is whether a person was born there and left after a week or a month, or they live there into their 20s or 30s,

or they've got family in those countries.

For me, there's always been a sense of longing and missing the country from sort of a distant vantage point.

I don't speak the language fluently, but soccer is its own language and way to connect to the culture.

Of the roughly 40 million people here in California, about one out of every four people were born

outside of the United States.

And so we're an incredibly diverse state full of immigrants and refugees and adoptees.

I love watching people in their country's jerseys or rooting for their teams.

It's really exciting to see that happen.