Born in Taegu in 1927, Kim Nam-jo is one of Korea's leading poets. She has published numerous volumes of poetry and essays and has been awarded many major literary prizes. She served for a time as president of the Korean Poets' Association and has long been active in the Korean P.E.N. Center. For almost forty years, until her retirement in 1993, she was professor of Korean Language and Literature at Sukmyong Woman's University in Seoul.
 Herself a Catholic, many of her poems are addressed to a mysterious transcendent figure that may or may not be God. Her main themes are love and loneliness. In many poems she depicts the passionate reality of human love and explores the ways in which human love mirrors the love which is the essence of the nature of God. She also suggests by her evocations of intense human solitude that love alone can give meaning to an otherwise desolate human existence.

  For peace

Let there be peace.
Let there be peace.
The sound of Fauré's Requiem
provokes tears even in sunlight.
Winter sunshine
stretching across the frozen plains,
together with all her children:
ah, Mother of Mercies!

Let there be peace.
Let there be ever more peace.
At the sound of the Requiem's music
offered for the dead,
the icy cold of the living is covered and warmed
so that truly truly
the living,
those whose lives are done,
and even those who have yet to live,
are all united in one sisterhood of souls.

Let there be peace.

  Tears

When I want to see tears
I sit down and watch the children's
television programme.
In the cartoons of famous fairy tales
the world is excessively beautiful,
and when the well-behaved children
grow sad,
transparent tears like azure glass
swell larger and larger
then roll down
like strange skeins of silk.

There I sense
what the dew drops are like
in the flowers in the kingdom of heaven,
as they tremble in the breeze.
My own heart grows clear,
and once again the world
becomes a place I treasure immensely.

  My humble prayer

Forgive. Forgive.
Again today my prayer
repeats that single word.
Even if you cannot forgive, Lord,
yet please, naturally, do so.

I have a love
who is for ever wandering in distant lands
but if his soul stays near me,
I will forgive by death and life
the bitterness and rage of death and life.
In case he comes
after I am dead,
I will command a lamp to be lit.
I pray you do likewise, Lord, for me.
For I am that person to you.

With fragile wings,
afraid of fire, unable to approach it seems,
displaying incurable faintheartedness
on account of
your too great splendour,
until today, when I am advanced in years,
I ever wander ragged in distant lands.

Forgive. Forgive.
Of all that you give
the mildest grace,
forgiveness, that alone,
today again,
with tears and sweat,
Lord, that alone I beg.

  Majestic Grove

A grove of towering trees three thousand years old,
all winter long a snowy waste, no end in sight,
where those trees
stand tall in the snow-covered expanse.

One winter,
when one of those trees
fell, caught in an avalanche,
the Good Lord
hugged it to his breast.
Softly he bade it:
Rest, my child, rest. . .

The Good Lord
remembered
when it had been just a tiny seed
and knew the young avatars
springing up from its enormous roots.

Rest, rest:
that day the Good Lord's love
was a loving consolation.
Supposing
there were a bird that had sung for three thousand years,
it would sing: Rest, rest.
For after three thousand years, that tree
must have been supremely weary.

That tree,
a member of the redwood species
known as Sequoia,
henceforth a sleeping saint
for the next three thousand years,
will enjoy the most blissful sleep and repose.

In the majestic grove
this winter too
among far-reaching endless snowy wastes.

  Foreign flags

There I first glimpsed
such desolate loneliness.

Above the soaring towers of the old castle
at Heidelberg
a flag is waving
like a boat being rowed
like a windmill turning in the wind
waving on and on
until the threads grow thin
then casting away that body like a corpse
they raise a new flag

I wonder
what it's like to be up there all alone
in the sky with the drifting clouds,
what it's like
to be shaking all over, looking down
on the mutability of people and things?

There I first glimpsed
such adult prayer.

  Good things

Good things never pass away.
Bitter partings
stolen preciousness
a good man's decease:
only the fact of their existence cannot perish.

Caught in strange light
half veiled in mist
half bathed in sunlight
relations and friends from bygone days
all are gathered together

no distinction between
living and dead
in the Good Lord's book
written by the Good Lord's hand
all equally lovingly listed

a snug night's sleep
an antique desk
a book once read then laid down open
moonlit nights of times gone by
even nearly spoken confessions of love:
all good things
never pass away.
Because a soul nestles
in all the true things
that emerge in human existence.
 

  Mary Magdalene  4

From you
I hear faintly the sound
of nails being hammered through hands and feet.

After the one you loved
had hands and feet pierced with nails
before your very eyes
and died
your body became the shrine
of the sound of nails being hammered,
the echoes of that sound.

Suffering
is the most powerful thing in all the world.
It is the awful dread
of standing before reiterated suffering.
It is love, you too loving.

Until you have piled up ashes
to form a high mountain
until you have bleached blood
into a river of pure water
All that remains unchanged between heaven and earth
is death and love.

So from you
every dawn and every night the pain
of nails being hammered into Hands and feet
knows no end.

  Poem and Reader

If one person in a year
ten people in ten years
if in the course of fifty years of writing
fifty readers
enter into deep communion
with one poet's secret soul

if in one hundred years
one hundred readers
faintly respond
to the living emotion and life-long love
one poet transmits

with true readers increasing
in number as slowly
as a stone growing in size
ah, if only I can flow in their veins
like a stream of hot pure-spirited blood.