Note: Munŭi was a village in North Ch’unch’ŏng Province. It now lies under the lake created by T’aech’ŏng Dam. Ko Un had gone there to attend the funeral of a poet’s mother.

The late watches

In thousandfold, ten-thousandfold darkest night

one flower has bloomed

after screaming alone.

Close beside it

a red flower has bloomed

speechless as iron.

Destruction of life

Cut off parents, cut off children!

This and that and this not that

and anything else as well

cut off and dispatch by the sharp blade of night.

Every morning heaven and earth

are piled with dead things.

Our job is to bury them all day long

and establish there a new world.

In Chŏngjin-dong

As we roam, full of hatred for a history crawling with worms of crime,

though we’re caught in sordid nets in the places we roam,

are we not like swarms of flying fish soaring in flight over golden evening waves?

Truly we are. Chance whimpers more than ever before.

At last it becomes an absolute destiny.

While we meet by chance, roaming about,

with history’s most dazzling absolute destiny we are blessed and distressed .

Dear friend that I miss, an evening in which we are gathered in golden light lasts for ever.

Though we be struck by thunderbolts—one, four, or nine—we will not fall

but summon the yet more needed lightning of the high tide’s horizon:

Come!

When we no longer roam here,

will any one make our sincerity roam nine floors or ten floors below?

Note: Chŏngjin-dong is a neighborhood in downtown Seoul full of small restaurants and bars.

Eŏh Island

No one ever went to Eŏh Island.

They say someone went, though,

went and never came back.

But where is Eŏh Island?

Down the waves’ bronze valleys

south-east, south-east, lies

only the eyeball-searing horizon.

But where is Eŏh Island?

Row as hard as you can,

skim with all sails set!

Perhaps that island, Cheju’s dream,

deep in its fishermen’s blood,

lies somewhere near?

Where is Eŏh Island?

That blind man’s island glimpsed at sunrise off Sŏngsan?

Nothing but waves, endless waves.

Thunder on, waves, thunder to the world.

Arise, white clouds.

Mighty surf, come rolling.

But where are we?

Where are we?

The sea comes breaking, no return.

In the waves hear the sound

of my daughter crying, left behind.

Is Eŏh Island anywhere near

the thousands of years spent fishing here?

It is there, though!

It was there, then it vanished.

Is Eŏh Island anywhere near?

No one ever went there.

Yet someone went

went and will never come back again.

Oh it’s there, for sure, it’s there.

Oh no. Only waves.

Nothing but overpowering waves.

Note: Eŏh Island is a magic island said to exist, invisible, off the coast of Cheju Island, south of Korea.

Concerning silence

Ah, silence!

Silence scattered all across Korea, south and north, paddies and meadows.

Come back!

Wretched folk in times past bequeathed us days for memorial rites.

Come back now, like kith and kin returning home for those rites,

like wind rustling through stands of maize,

return like minnows making their way against a river’s current,

speeding through ripples unlike yesterday’s.

Come, like the sound of a father’s cough stuck in rotten manure.

It’s there on the blank page of an era unable to write,

there in roots between rocks in a cliff –

in the night-time cliff at Naksan-sa Temple.

It’s in copulating bodies, it’s there in sleep.

It’s everywhere. Silence!

Come back, in an gigantic silence

and open a solemn assembly of silence

Come back, silence more frightening than any shout,

than any fierce, bestial howl.

Scatter all Korea’s silences

across Asia, Africa, the Indian Ocean.

Come back. A single silence is no silence at all.

A single sound is a sound

but that sound lives only in every silence.

All you trees in the eastward hills of Wŏntong and Inje,

you closed doors, closed lips,

you each and every servile human sorrow,

you cold winds raised by an ancient ghost –

let all things go away that should go away and you, silence, come back.

Dry up all lies with the greatest silence on earth. The right time is autumn.

My pony Eul P’a-so

As the night closes in, the road lies alert

like a guiding voice.

The road stretches far, wide awake for us.

Wounded Eul P’a-so, my pony!

Let’s pursue our path without haste.

There’s nothing we need regret.

Life in itself is never sublime, it’s the road we take

and the passing of time that make it sublime.

A spider’s web stretches dark across the sky,

catching the starlight as it falls.

No, no one can ever address the stars,

no matter how powerful a voice they have.

All we can do is fill with night

the empty vessels piled rattling on our cart.

The road becomes more and more familiar,

as the busy tinkling of your bells—

tinkling on through years of fruitlessness—

sometimes drowses on the journey.

Let’s pursue our path, not hastening, old Eul P’a-so.

If our hearts are not too busy

the dark will duly stand aside,

then humbly follow on behind us.

Along meadow roads where breezes doze

we pass before lonely unlit homesteads

and wide cabbage-field roads where steps keep sliding.

Dying, an old man neither summons death nor shuns it;

so let’s pursue our path, not hastening.

By the time day comes we’ll be there.

Or the chill house will come rushing to meet us

after waiting a while at the end of the road.

So let’s pursue our path without haste, old pony Eul P’a-so.

I regret my poverty must pay for your fodder:

you were born resolved to accept no gifts, I’m sorry.

The road turns everything sleeping into road

even the veiling night.

But why is everything here so familiar,

living, and dying, and the torments of youth?

Old Eul P’a-so! You know my heart too well!

Look! Passing in front of the sleeping tavern

you slacken your pace and turn your eyes back.

But let’s leave it behind us now.

Dark night is better than any wine.

While I reflect on my death, or yours,

you reflect on mine.

Let’s pursue our path without haste.

Suppose we went to rest in a clean place, your stall, say,

and died there, with never a thought of tomorrow?

Eul P’a-so, now we’re more than half way there.

Look! already your withered tail’s sweeping the ridge!

Retreat into the Mountains (1977)

The Buddhist scriptures carved in wood

If this land of ours would only sink beneath the sea!

Sink deep for, say, three hundred years, sink down

till nothing was left above the waves,

search as they might,

nothing under heaven’s arch above the sea.

Then, once its whole length and breadth

had soaked for, say, three hundred years,

like the wood where Buddhist Scriptures were carved,

it could be raised to the surface again.

Snowstorm, sun, moon, stars? Oh, let them stay put!

They can endure, unbearable.

If at last our Korean land

were brought floating lightly back to the daylight,

an empty land,

all the country’s tawdry powers dead,

a new nation might be established there—

one with new flowers, new harvests,

a land where they would speak a language

forgotten, then rediscovered.

Yes! And then declare the truth;

since the Scriptures remain intact, declare

that henceforth everyone is the Holy One.

Korean land! This present life will never do!

Away with mass-games! No more mass-games!

Treat people as people. All people as sacred.

Close your eyes, now, Korean land,

sink firmly down for three hundred years.

If not, you’ll have to sink down

for a full thousand years!

Note: The reference is to the more than 80,000 wooden printing blocks containing the Tripitaka Koreana, carved in the 13^th century and now preserved at Haein-sa Temple.

A secret question

Tell me, cricket, what do you think you’re doing

night after night, slicing through the dark?

You slice through people’s sleep too, you know.

Do you want scarlet blood to be shed?

Ah, nowadays people don’t shed blood!

All they want is a quiet life!

Yet there’s not an inch of ground,

not a single hill, not soaked in sad blood.

Cricket, old cricket,

rolling drunk on icy dew, cricket friend:

every last drop of this country’s dew,

each single one of our children’s tears

is all blood now, nothing but blood.

But everything lies asleep, all around us is asleep,

nothing but deep deep sleep.

Is there nothing left,

except ugly guys so fast asleep

they’d never once notice

if you cut out their guts, or their gall-bladder?

Cricket, old cricket, go on!

Slice through the dark, slice through sleep,

and jolt minds awake like autumn frost,

like an early, biting frost.

Retreat into the mountains

You know, when one eternity’s done with, you find another eternity’s on the way!

How could today be just today?

I’m going into the mountains with my head shaved bare

but can anyone comfort me for having left my guts behind?

The heart is huge, even when there’s not a soul in sight.

As I go into the mountains on a winter’s night,

from the skies of Eurasia

with a heart vast as Eurasia

I can hear far-off waves

like the names of people.

Don’t say that everything’s in vain.

True, very true.

Who could spread out children’s tears radiantly, then bask in moonlight?

Awakening from an eternity of sleep in my body

not a single bend in the sleeping water is in vain.

I’m going into the mountains with my head shaved bare, in the guise of a ghost.

I’m going into the mountains, from where there’s no coming out.

Gazing at the empty things of this world

suspended one by one on branches of trees —

setting moon,

you’re the only one to welcome me, fierce guerilla, moon.

You, moon, and the darkness of my infinity of tiny worlds

that I look back on with lifted head.

Games with a globe

Last night I cut off one arm

and gave it to a poor woman.

Then I cut off the other arm—

gave that to her too.

So now I have no arms. Ha ha.

Early this morning I cut off both legs

and gave them to a nearby idler.

I’m legless now. Ha ha.

I wonder though:

did I get anything back?

This morning I abandoned my torso

to a lion in the zoo.

So now I have

no shoulder-blades, no navel either.

No lungs, what’s more, no spleen or liver. Ha ha ha.

It can’t be helped, now I am nothing but a head,

nothing but a head,

nothing but a head. Ha ha.

A bald-headed monk from Chogye Temple

kicks my head away.

Off I go spinning merrily.

Over there another shaved monk pokes at me.

Up I soar high

then down I fall, plunk!

Global games! World games! Ha ha ha.

Just look at this!

With one single butt I can send the earth,

this mindless earth, this mischievous earth astray,

off course, off its tracks!

I can send this world off

to vanish for ever into some void of outer space!

After Mountain Seclusion (1977)

Return to Chogye Mountain

All through the summer of ‘78

I was forced to stay confined in Songgwang Temple.

Tell me, friend, isn’t that called incarceration?

For one whole month

I listened to the night birds singing while my brain grew addled.

I wrote not a single poem.

Stay there and rest, they said,

stay there and rest for three or four months. . .

Instead of poems a sharpened knife grew up in my breast.

And what became of that knife, you ask? One night,

as I made my escape from Chogye Mountain, I finally threw it away.

I went back to Songgwang Temple a second time.

Stop flowing, stream friend at Hwaom Temple,

form instead a dark blue pillar of water.

What a century of fearful contradictions!

A century of contradictions for our land!

That’s why I have to be a poet!

Tell me, poet: will people say you were weak?

A poet, even when he dies, lives in our history.

Therefore, poet, your children

will surely say you were strong.

Note: Chogye Mountain and the temples named here are all in the south-western Cholla region; the temples are some of the most important centers of Korean Buddhism.

For myself

Don’t cover my eyes before you shoot me.

I will die on my feet.

Unjustly accused in this beautiful land,

I will die on my feet.

I’ll not call for my mother.

Or for anything else.

The more gruesome death is,

the more luxurious it is.

Death is no defeat,

no disgrace, no senility.

It should rather be a red flower,

a white hyacinth.

It should be that darkness of philosophy

like a cliff in deepest night.

Shoot now, shoot!

Five bullets from an M16,

then the coup-de-grace.

This is the only moment

in all our nation’s history

when I can be an artist.

Shoot now!

Shoot!

Don’t cover my eyes,

young guardsmen.

I lived with my eyes, with my eyes I’ll die.

Early Morning Road (1978)

Arrows

Transformed into arrows

let’s all go, body and soul!

Piercing the air

let’s go, body and soul,

with no way of return,

transfixed there,

rotting with the pain of striking home,

never to return.

One last breath! Now, let’s quit the string,

throwing away like rags

all we’ve had for decades

all we’ve enjoyed for decades

all we’ve piled up for decades,

happiness,

the lot.

Transformed into arrows

let’s all go, body and soul!

The air is shouting! Piercing the air

let’s go, body and soul!

In dark daylight the target is rushing towards us.

Finally, as the target topples in a shower of blood,

let’s all just once as arrows

bleed.

Never to return!

Hail, arrows, our nation’s arrows!

Hail, warriors! Spirits of the fallen!

Early morning road

Mother!

First, you sold a few handfuls of scalded greens,

some bunches of radishes

from your vegetable basket.

Then, as your son was leaving home,

kicking the dew along the early morning road,

mother, you said, “Go up to Seoul and make good, really good!”

You gave him a ball of salted rice, and the fare.

Then, after your son had left home, mother,

you set the Seven Stars of the Great Wain

on your white hair, though those stars lost

their miraculous powers a thousand years ago,

and you prayed and prayed,

firmly fixed before a bowl of cold water,

and mother, thanks to all those prayers you said

your son became a drunken lout.

Seoul? Nothing but a foreign colony,

and then again, a new colony

where sunset is a rotten pumpkin sinking

into the lower reaches of the River Han!

For thirty long years he served the Yanks,

grew old and sick working as their houseboy.

Whenever he drank there was so much to say,

and always a reborn breast, as well,

but when the next morning dawned, lo and behold,

there in his breast a gaping hole again,

and clearly visible through that hole

the early morning road of a day long ago.

Mother, you can clearly be seen

gazing after your son as he goes on his way,

standing long on the village hilltop.

Now that’s enough,

go back home to your mud-walled poverty,

don’t keep counting off on your fingers

the days and the months,

waiting for your son to appear.

There was a blizzard, a blizzard and a downpour.

Your son became a drunken lout.

Not a rich man in a house

with twelve front doors,

only press a bell and it all gets done,

with powers that devour the rights of a thousand,

commandeering the goods of thousands more.

Your son has nothing, nothing at all,

his leper’s eyebrows are all gone too,

and when your son turned forty one day

as he roused himself from a drunken stupor

he smashed the glass in his open hand, then grasped it,

blood flowed red, red as a new-made world.

He beat his breast and beat his brow,

the blood poured down. No,

he must not wait any longer now.

He must not wait, a drunken lout.

I have abolished the coming day,

that day awaited for five thousand years,

after such long ages, five hundred years, fifty years,

ages with South and North chopped in two at the waist,

rifle barrel to rifle barrel,

ages with this one and that one acting as puppet-dictator;

that day will come, it will certainly come,

if you only keep waiting—I have quite abolished it.

Mother, do not ask when that day will come,

that day when each family will be united

in one embrace,

when the sun will rise in every heart,

do not ask.

Now mother’s drunken loutish son

is on his way to the battlefield,

to the battlefield where only fighting can make life possible.

In the bitter wind on the early morning road,

with clenched fists I kneaded the ball of rice you gave me.

My heart is brimming full with bitterness,

full of that money you gave for the fare.

This present day is your long long waiting.

At break of dawn, setting out along the early morning road,

my body has turned into a sharpened knife,

turned into a blaze of fire in the dark;

after the fight I will return

with that day loaded on my back.

With a blood-stained banner waving,

that tattered banner streaming out,

with my wounded leg roughly bound up,

I will return, bearing that day.

That day is your son.

That day is every mother’s son.

No, mother, I can’t say that.

I recall the sorrow of your blasted breasts

swaying as you pounded barley

in the days of our youth;

now your son has died

and reduced to blanched bones

whimpers for the milk of your sorrow again.

Mother, in his old age your son sets out for the battlefield

and surely that day will come,

sustained by five thousand years of history.

Our nation will be one.

In a temple’s main hall

Down with Buddha!

Down with handsome, well-fed Buddha!

What’s he doing up there with that oh so casually elegant wispy beard?

Next, break down that painted whore of a crossbeam!

A dragon’s head? What use is that, a dragon’s head?

Tear down that temple, drive out the monks,

turn it all into dust and maggots!

Phaw!

Buddha with nothing, that’s real Buddha!

Our foul-mouthed Seoul street-market mother, she’s real Buddha!

We’re all of us Buddhabuddhabuddha real!

Living Buddha? One single cigarette, now

there’s a real cool Holy Buddha!

No, not that either.

For even supposing this world were a piece of cake,

with everyone living it up and living well,

in gorgeous high-class gear, with lots of goods produced

thanks to Korean-American technological collaboration,

each one able to live freely, with no robbing of rights,

Paradise, even!

utter Eden unequalled, plastered with jewels, still, even then,

day after day people would have to change the world.

Why, of course, in any case,

day after day this world must all be overturned

and renewed to become a newly blooming lotus flower.

And that is Buddha.

Down for sure with those fifteen hundred years

rolling on foolish, rumbling along:

time fast asleep like stagnant water that stinks and stinks.

Indangsu

What is our country’s deepest point? Indangsu.

Where are our country’s deepest thoughts found?

Not in Toegye, the noted scholar,

but in the firm resolve of one destitute girl

from Mongkŭmp’o, by the name of Shim Ch’ŏng.

Come, clouds, driving furious!

Beat out, deep drums!

Sharp waves in Mongkŭm Straits,

tear away at the loose rock slabs!

Open your eyes, everyone!

Blind father, open your eyes!

Go sell yourself for sixty bushels of rice!

Little girl, poised on a gunwale

with seventy boats at your water burial

out there off Changsan Cape:

your body’s the world with its icy winds,

your body’s the world rising up again,

your body’s now the lotus blossom.

One body freely tossed

with your head muffled in deep blue skirts,

tossed into the water off Changsan Cape:

awake now, world! Awake, everyone, like a battle!

After being a battle speeding,

with all our people wielding their tools,

the battle can turn into a dance

and merrily go dancing along!

Look: the world made new!

With open eyes!

Shim Chŏng! ah, Shim Chŏng, my dear!

Note: In one of Korea’s most famous traditional tales, the young girl Shim Chŏng allows herself to be thrown into the sea at a spot called Indangsu, in sacrifice by fishermen, in the hope of helping her blind father recover his sight. Taken into the Dragon King’s undersea palace, she is later released and found by fishermen, floating in a lotus blossom. At last, by her daughterly virtue, her father’s eyes are opened and he recognizes her.

Homeland Stars (1984)

Eating in the Fields

It was Chaeton’s mother.

She’d said they’d be planting rice

out in the big paddy-field at Pangadal, so I was to come for the meal.

When it was lunch-time, I came quite shamelessly.

Seeing me, she called the laborers

and the laborers’ kids

and even the women working in the field across the way:

“Come on, come along.”

Every single one of us ate

all together

on the paddy-field bank,

the distant hills and the sky joining in,

eating heaped-up bowls of rice.

Kŭmnam Street

On the third day the body is duly

taken from the ancestral home

in some village up in Hwasun County

and buried, laid to rest

together with all the weeping and wailing;

on their return to the house someone alive

takes over the room where the corpse has been.

It only needs one wipe with a cloth

and the room is just a room again.

I went back to Kŭmnam Street in Kwangju

after several years had elapsed.

The fighting and carnage were all forgotten,

neon signs soared flashing in the evening air,

the street and the people were enjoying themselves.

The Provincial Government buildings too reared

white in the midnight gloom,

bullet-scars erased,

seeming to ask if such things had ever really happened?

But the sound of my guts rumbling told me:

No vain-glorious gestures, if you are here and alive.

No high-sounding nonsense, if you are here.

Note: Kŭmnam Street in Kwangju (South Cholla Province) was the scene of some of the most violent fighting in the terrible days of May 1980.

To the mothers of Argentina

Hey-ho! Hey-ho! Argentina’s a long way away!

But bore straight down and there you are!

A new world has come in Argentina, I hear!

Now, surely a so-called new world is one

where all the things done in past days are brought to light?

They’ve uncovered mass graves in Argentina.

Thousands of bones have been brought to light!

Now, surely a so-called new world is one

where all the things buried are brought to light?

A world where the living shut up

and let the bones speak for themselves?

They’ve uncovered mass graves of children

somewhere in Argentina.

Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!

No sooner dug up, their cries echoed again

in Argentina’s new world, in all the world.

What a world this is! Where kids are a threat

and have to be killed! For seven years on end

soldiers shot, then buried, shot, then buried.

Poor buried kids, their very innocence made a crime.

Now the mothers of Argentina,

all those mothers who barely survived, sobbing,

are anxious to dig up their children’s bones.

They come rushing up, all carrying spades,

and uncover heaps of limbless corpses:

husbands, daughters, sons as well;

and to those mothers weeping,

embracing perhaps just one single bone,

to Argentina, a new world has come: a so-called new world,

a really new world! But did it have to come like that?

I hear a new world has come to Argentina;

I hear a new world has come to Argentina!

Mop

On windy days –

days when laundry flaps in the wind—

I want to turn into a mop

yes, without being obsequious, I want to turn into a mop.

I won’t ask to what extent

our country is defiled and polluted.

I just want to turn into a mop

and humbly wipe one spot, at least.

Once I am a mop, I must not forget

the days when I used to wipe my prison cell.

Yes, I want to turn into a mop.

Once I am a mop

I want to wipe my whole filthy life.

When the wiping’s through,

I want that filthy mop to be wrung out

over and over

again and again

until it can take no more.

I want to be reborn as a new mop in a new country

Road

Whenever I see a road, that means

I have found a place to hurry towards.

If I see a hamlet like Shinyŏngni or Naeri,

it tells me there is somewhere beyond for me to go.

That’s how it is. It only takes a by-way

in Majŏngni, a simple highway in Jangho-won,

and I am assured of a sleepless night.

I only have to see a road and

invariably energy comes welling up.

I must go.

Don’t ask me where I must go to!

At its other end the road turns into a land.

It’s to that land that I must go. You see,

I am part of this nation that has spent

its whole history on a rugged road --

the Valley Rift of Ch’ugaryŏng, leading from Seoul

to the far North-east coast;

I must travel along every road

in North and South, from end to end.

For come what may there is a road

that leads to one united land.

I must go.

Sunlight

It’s absolutely inevitable!

So just take a deep breath

and accept this adversity.

But look!

A distinguished visitor deigns to visit

my tiny north-facing cell.

Not the chief making his rounds, no,

but a ray of sunlight as evening falls,

a gleam no bigger than a crumpled stamp.

A sweetheart fit to go crazy about.

It settles there on the palm of a hand,

warms the toes of a shyly bared foot.

Then as I kneel and, undevoutly,

offer it a dry, parched face to kiss,

in a moment that scrap of sunlight slips away.

After the guest has departed through the bars,

the room feels several times colder and darker.

This military prison special cell

is a photographer’s darkroom.

Without any sunlight I laughed like a fool.

One day it was a coffin holding a corpse.

One day it was altogether the sea.

A wonderful thing!

A few people survive here.

Being alive is a sea

without a single sail in sight.

Visit to a birch grove

Before I reached Chilhyŏn Mountain

on my way from Kwanghye-wŏn one February,

I found myself approaching a broad valley thick with white birch trees.

Someone said: Go on! and gave me a push in the back.

I turned to see who it was.

There was no one there. But look!

How honestly the cast-off boles of the white birch grove confront the world!

They are altogether indifferent to the distant hills

that are fully accustomed to snow. The winter trees alone

know nothing of depravity.

There are no lies in sorrow. And how can anyone not weep at life?

In our country, for centuries weeping was really women’s work:

weeping that would find its comfort in itself.

The birch trees live to themselves

but make me one of them.

Not everyone can come here, but it doesn’t matter,

the trees make themselves one with each of us and they are beautiful!

As I beheld the trees, the branches of the trees,

the trembling of the tree-tops in the sky,

I grew too proud with myself and the world,

and longed to be burdened heavily,

heavily burdened with bundles of firewood.

Or rather, I longed to become gentle and mild

like a new bud born of this cold solitude; gentle and mild

as the well-cooked meat at a crossroads tavern.

Because my life was too dogmatic,

because I was harsh, even to the breeze.

How long ago was it? This kind of place?

This place has that intensity we find only once in ten years.

That revered intensity!

I feel a lump rising in my throat,

my heart knows that this intensity

is not addressed to me alone,

it is addressed to the whole wide world.

The time is coming when people will realize

that they are each one part of a multitude.

When I was a child, I already grew old.

Arriving here, now I have to be born again.

So in this moment, one with the white birch’s quite natural winter,

I return to a state of charm and prettiness,

growing up as another person’s only child.

I turned my back on the road leading down to Kwanghyewŏn

and headed for the rugged mountain path leading

towards windswept Chilhyŏn Mountain.

Resurrection

East Sea, stretch wide your million trillion waves.

Who could ever tame your boundless ocean?

Sleep well, T’abaek Mountain—at one with the sky—and you, simple folk of Yŏngdong.

Tonight is so long, with not even a murmur of waves,

a round night, the world sleeping peacefully.

You empty crab shells are the only things moving,

yet you shouldn’t just scatter as shards of shell.

You must come to life again, the East Sea’s pride,

and crawl all along the lengthy shore

from Sea Diamond Mountain to as far south as Ulchin.

There’s nothing in life worth repenting for, compared to the glory of a death,

so don’t howl in tumultuous sound-waves all night long.

Return to life instead of howling unknown to anyone,

in the ultrasonic sound-waves of our land’s rebirth.

As the sun bursts from the sea, crimson before Naksan Temple,

go racing sideways on your ten mighty legs,

your bodies fully reborn after absorbing that red glow,

taking on new flesh in each of your shells, and regaining your two crab-eyes as well.

Go crawl anew, spouting foam like a moonlit night;

crabs, all you crabs, crawl all along the east coast.

Yes, indeed! Your resurrection, ah, your East Sea.

East Sea, stretch wide your million trillion waves.

Thunderstorms, Typhoon Aida, or any towering typhoons

are all mere desolate foam to each one of you.

Crabs along the steep east coast, now you have a destination. So go!

Nip at the fearful reefs crouching on the sea-floor many thousand fathoms deep.

Go, then return, through miles and miles of ocean, each holding a fragment of those reefs.

The ocean, bitten, hurt, will shine at last with pain,

covered with howling waves, furious waves

so no horizon can been seen, no matter how we gaze.

It’s morning now; all the world is awake again --

the sky, T’aebaek Mountain, the people of Yŏngdong --

so come back now, departed travelers, you stateless travelers,

flesh joined to every bone, soul or whatever restored to every body.

Come back, like laborers of every age going home from autumn’s darkening fields.

And how should this be only for crabs? You cuttlefish that went swimming farthest,

out to latitude 136 degrees east, in the distant reaches of the East Sea,

you cuttlefish, hung drying in daylight from Kosong to Sokcho, Chumunjin, and Pyonghae,

swim out again as dazzling living squid;

returning to life from every kind of death by a solemn resurrection,

by the power of your freedom and wisdom, all united as one.

Go out beyond the islands of Ullŭng-do, Tŏk-do, far out into the unbounded sea.

Ah, all you who didn’t survive our country’s times of shame, but died,

forlorn spirits, dead with no home—

and what’s a spirit? Just a muttering voice, just a wind, no more—

rise up from that state; resolutely assume life again.

Each one, born again, here before the East Sea’s million trillion waves,

dance! Dance on Wŏnsan’s famous white sandy shore

that stretches for miles beside the East Sea

on a moonlit night after heavy typhoon clouds have dispersed unnoticed.

White-clad multitudes of old Korea, overflow in dance.

East Sea, stretch wide your million trillion waves.

Drums and bells, bury each so-called king, then ring out in this world.

East Sea, stretch wide, your million trillion waves.

My comrade, East Sea, stretch wide your million trillion waves.

Pastoral Poems (1986)

Crossing Rice-fields at Nightfall

One star already out, the world’s the cosmos now.

In the village it’s the season of the smell of dried grass,

here and there the light of sparingly used lamps shines out.

As I make my way home across the rice-fields at nightfall,

sometimes brushing away the invasive insects,

I remember old Namdong who was laid to rest yesterday.

It’s as if death makes our hearts grow deeper;

I must change a bit from what I was when the old man was alive.

I keep looking back at the rice-fields, more lovely than ever

in the darkness.

More blasted by mildew than last year:

how much work and affection it must have consumed.

Demanding eighty-eight times the hand’s intervention,

isn’t that one-year farming?

In autumn, no matter how poor the rice harvest,

how big the debts,

in autumn the poker too must be busy at work as autumn demands.

No thought at all of leaving here, no thought of rest.

As life goes on, time is not such a big thing to people,

it’s the smallest thing for all of us.

On the way home, today the evening field-path is sublimely still.

After growing tall in drought, in late monsoons,

despite mildew and blight,

what is the rice to us if not adult,

after it has so silently put out ears?

Quick, let’s be off, and with our bodies stinking of loam

lift up our kids once, holding them high in the dark,

then put them down as one nation, at least.

A simple flower

This flower’s not gone on to college,

nothing like that; she’s a simple girl,

and after completing the local school

far down the road,

she just does the housework at home.

She’s a modestly modest girl

in a crazy ill-tempered world.

The four-o’clock flower, or pride-of-Peru,

with its pink stars, and white,

is a flower that reveals

the truth about things

brightly

in the flash of an eye each day

as she comes out in the garden

early of an evening.

Simple daughters of Korea:

Suni, Puni!

Note: Suni, Pun are common traditional names for girls.

Flowers

Spring has come,

spring has come and gone,

and yet, up here in the mountain valleys,

there’s not a single flower to be seen!

No common-or-garden magnolias,

not one cherry blossom!

Luckily in the vegetable patch

yellow flowers are blooming on a plant run to seed; jubilation!

Go once around the mountain, once.

Aha! Here are masses of bushes in flower!

And look there, in that field,

a carpet of tiny shepherds-purse flowers!

Here are flowers in bloom, at last!

You want to see our countryside flowers?

Well, that’s it! You’ve seen them already.

Everything useful, even the flowers,

has all been uprooted and carried away.

Off to Seoul, off to Seoul.

All our nation’s natural beauty

uprooted and carried away.

Not only the flowers! Not only the girls!

Already the big trees in front of the village hall,

poor things,

have their roots wrapped in ropes of straw;

soon they’ll be torn up and carted off too,

taken somewhere for the Olympic Games.

Spring has come and gone,

ha ha, and not a flower to be seen!

Only TV sets everywhere!

TV sets everywhere!

Fly High, Poem! (1986)

Mokp’o bound

That’s right. Aboard an economy-class train

crossing the horizon of the fields around Kimje after stopping at Iri,

sprinkling salt over a couple of hard-boiled eggs

then giving one to the kid in the next seat,

Ah, early winter fields glimpsed outside!

The breath of someone tight-lipped covering the empty fields!

Pure bean paste! Clay!

The invariably warm breath of someone

despite the terrible times he’s been through.

This land still has its living springs

Here and there along the shores of Cheju Island

there are fresh water springs.

They’re covered by the sea when the tide is high,

but in evening with the ebbing tide

those springs appear.

That water flows and flows underground, then comes gushing out.

In a valley of Mount Munsu too, down Ansŏng way,

there’s a simple spring I know, innocent as a child;

a spring that flows from under the frozen earth.

Thousands of years of history!

This land still has its living springs.

Divided land; blasted land; trampled land;

though the skies are red with chemical smog,

and the springtime drought lasts a full two months,

though the Revolution’s been on for thirty years and isn’t finished yet,

though heavy metals contaminate the soil,

and fifteen hundred students and workers are currently in prison,

this land still has its living springs.

Can gushing water rot?

Can flowing water die?

Yes! This land has people who fight.

Fighters all!

Your words are perpetually new and full of strong assurance.

Strange to say,

your words have no hypocrisy.

None of the hypocrisy of those who do not fight, or only pretend to fight.

Strange to say,

those who fight to the death do not die.

This land can only be renewed by fight.

The hours of fight are truly life and youth.

The history of our present time

is the history of the students’ struggle,

the history of the workers’ movement.

Fresh gushing springs!

Flowing, flowing,

mile after mile underground,

flowing, flowing, then gushing out beside the sea.

Springs that gush from hillsides and valleys

all over this dear land of ours,

flowing, flowing,

and there, by the sea: Hail! freedom arising,

equality for all, billowing waves!

Young friends!

This land still has its living springs.

This land still has its fights.

And so long as there are people who fight,

so long as all is not brought to an end,

this land can become a new world for sure!

A new nation, and as a new nation,

with other nations,

this land is indeed a new world!

When May is gone

What shall we do when May is gone?

One day in May at dark midnight martial law dropped down;

we were dragged away like so many dogs,

beaten and punched as we went along;

so what shall we do when May is gone?

One day in May we all rose up,

clasping a thousand years’ rage in our hands,

clenching bare fists, we all rose up.

Charging down the green-leafed road,

down Kŭmnam Street—Liberation Road, our road—

we all rose up that day;

our hearts were ablaze

as we drove out dark night.

Our cry: Democracy! The Masses! The Nation!

We rose up against our land’s division,

imposed betrayal,

against the tanks reinforcing

forty years’ brutal martial law.

Sing! Fight! Sadly bury these bodies!

Down the green-leaved road, our road,

soon we were felled, felled by their guns,

spouting blood, we dropped, spouting crimson blood.

We were dragged away, fallen corpses

covered in gray dust, covered in ashes,

we were carried away like so many dead dogs,

carried off somewhere in fast army trucks.

Ah, Mangwŏldong! Not only there! Not only there!

Still they lie in unknown places,

buried there. Seven hundred? Eight hundred? Two thousand of us?

What shall we do when May is gone?

One day in May we fought to the end.

Around the Provincial Government building,

down scattered back-alleys we fought on and on,

trampling the stains of our dead comrades’ blood.

We fought on, proudly bearing the name of

the Kwangju Struggle Citizens’ Army.

Brought low by foreign interests,

brought low by compradors,

brought low by all the dregs of Yushin;

defending our land from further disgrace,

our breasts were pierced and so we died.

What shall we do when May is gone?

As night was falling a high school boy

came tearing his clothes out there in the road

in front of the Capitol,

his shout went echoing down the street:

My sister’s been murdered! It’s brutal, inhuman!

Give me a gun! I can fight too!

Just then they shot him, that student died there.

A girl’s sweet milky breast was sliced like curds,

and so they sliced gentle girls, pregnant wives; they died.

Down roads, down side-streets, and cul-de-sacs,

men died and were brutally hauled away.

Democracy! The Masses! The Nation!

Down that street, one day in May,

suddenly, alas, the savages drew near:

the 20th Division from Yangpyŏng, special troops,

the 31st Division,

the 7th airborne, the 3rd, the 11th,

martial law troops came smashing through.

Striking at random with M16 rifles,

smashing down butt-ends,

slashing and slashing with bayonets fixed,

stinking strong of drink;

all who surrendered were shot, as well.

Ah, it was hell; screaming and crying, surging like waves.

What shall we do when May is gone?

Then over all that whirlpool of terror

spread a tomb-like silence,

covering the dead and the living alike.

What shall we do when May is gone?

We really should have started all over again out of death;

those who lived, forgetting to grieve,

should have started again out there on the streets of death;

but we have died and have no words,

we’re alive and have no words,

we’re in prison cooking grit,

with never a glimpse of the sky above,

we’re all of us silently gnashing our teeth,

each heart brimming full

with a thousand years’ bitter resentment,

swallowing down this age of shame.

The 5th Republic’s army boots go clattering

down the streets of outrage.

When that May was past, we loaded death on our backs,

and one bitter day for the first time went out

to Kŭmnam Street and Chungjang Street;

we recognized each other and retrieved the handshakes

they had robbed us of: You’re still alive!

You’re still alive too!

But then we went quickly to Mangwŏldong, and there we wept.

Since then we have united every year and risen up again.

Several times we have seen how

with two puffs of our hot breath

we could identify

shadowy enemies, our foes on the other side.

In our country’s sky

the Stars and Stripes still flies high.

Over our country, see, Japanese swarming.

Kwangju today in no longer Kwangju.

Kwangju is not just Kwangju.

It is the nucleus of our country’s history.

Since then, every street has risen up.

Every village has gathered murmuring.

With workers’ lives turned into lumps of coal,

with beef bought no dearer than a load of shit,

farmers have swallowed pesticide,

too many of them have fallen and died.

Taxi drivers have died in a sea of flame,

families have died by coal-brick fumes.

What shall we do when May is gone?

Students have committed self-immolation, a heroic end.

Dozens have volunteered,

and wait to do the same.

What shall we do when May is gone?

Billions spent on tear gas bombs,

apple-shaped bombs, zigzag bombs,

bombs have hit eyes and put them out,

bombs have hit breasts and put lives out.

You throw just one stone, you’re carted off,

beaten with truncheons till you vomit blood.

What shall we do when May is gone?

In factories, in schools,

the fight for justice goes on unending,

in prison too, till victory comes.

But in the towns of deceit

the flag of America proudly flies.

The Japanese LDP come and go merrily.

They come and go like eunuchs

making visits to parents-in-law.

Even Yushin rubbish makes a return,

intent on grabbing its fair share too.

What shall we do when May is gone?

If we’re to smash these foreign powers,

these compradors, this treachery,

if we’re to sweep away our land’s division,

and this fascist rabble here,

if we’re to achieve our autonomy,

our equality, our reunification,

if we’re to dance for once our dance

upon old history’s dance-floor here,

today we have to let our bodies

grimly rot and die.

Then, buried deep within this history,

dead, we shall fight on.

Feverishly living, we shall fight on.

For see how now we live suffocating.

Ah, May, May!

Glorious fresh green,

dazzling days, ah May!

What shall we do when May is gone?

Days thick with tear gas,

tears pouring down,

hacking coughs,

the cuckoo is calling, in the night,

sadly, the cuckoo is calling.

What shall we do when May is gone?

Alas, dead champions, departed friends!

Our hundred year’s battle is still not done!

We’ll have to fight on for a hundred years more, old friends!

We’ll have to fight on from age to age!

What shall we do when May is gone?

But always we’ll unite anew.

Scattered, we’ll always gather again.

Blood-seething May!

Month of struggle, tossing body and soul,

May, you are us!

See us advancing united,

through the parting ocean waves!

Though May must go by,

for us May is ever alive.

Yes, we, we are May, we are May!

A great outcry arises from our people’s seventy million throats.

The frontline of joy exploding that morning

in this land!

Embrace!

For such is our May! Liberation arising out of death.

May that day quickly come!

Note: This poem portrays the violent Massacre in Kwangju in May 1980, in the course of which many were brutally killed. It evokes the ongoing dispute over the number of those who died. Mangwŏldong Cemetery just outside of Kwangju holds the graves of many of the victims. The poem ends with evocations of people who took their own lives during the 1980s in protest against the dictatorial government and its policies.

Your Eyes (1988)

A white sail

No one wants a gale to blow, for sure!

And yet, white sail out there on the sea,

you yearn for a gale with all your heart;

because it’s only in a gale

that you can really come alive.

One white sail of endurance and longing,

far out on the dark blue sea:

our battle!

I can’t tear my eyes away.

Of course, to the grass beneath my feet,

this light mountain breeze must seem a gale!

First snow

The first snow is falling, and

tells this generation not to die!

The first snow is falling!

On our dear land of water and hills

--harshly bruised, true--

the first snow is falling!

So much to be done!

How many years has it been, I wonder?

The trembling newness of first holding hands,

a name that shone on every empty branch

by the power of love’s first flame.

Now the first snow is falling

in streets where that name is quite unknown!

There’s no going back in life, after coming so far

offering my innocence and my disgrace without regret;

but what has this generation come to?

By a hatred that can never be love,

by a hatred that has not even the freedom

to call a foe a foe.

The first snow is falling on you,

young friends arrested, hauled away,

your angry eyes closed at last,

after hiding here and there a while,

And on you who hauled them away

it’s falling, too!

Such grief to see this generation’s last days!

Yet see that unity of burning hearts,

so strong it cannot be broken!

And if ever it’s broken, coming together again!

Can there be any who will turn their backs

and ignore the division at the waist of our lovely land?

The first snow is falling

on the prison roof over which

my sisters’ sharp-edged songs once spread,

and every roof

and on the waves of every sea

that come rolling shoreward too too fast

and break

and on our battle.

It’s falling to tell this generation

not to die!

To tell our land of rivers and hills:

Take breath again!

Cursed grief is also grief, you know.

Morning Dew (1990)

Fruit

Last summer’s

efforts of the blazing sun

by night the efforts of the dark

have brought into being

these few bright crimson hips on a dog-rose briar.

Which is as it should be: they ripened to the sound

of the nightlong cricket’s chilling song.

Morning dew

Ecstasy without words:

my craving must in the end revert

to being a single drop of morning dew!

Snowfall

Snow is falling.

I want to become a village dog

I want to become a dog

out in the village barley fields.

I want to become a bear

asleep, aware of nothing,

deep in the hills.

Snow is falling.

A cold day

A cold and windy day

How I long to live there

Warmth is not the only happiness

A cold day

A cold day when all the fallen leaves

go rolling spinning away

Brrrrrrrrr

Shivering

How I long to live there

Every house has made its winter kimchi

and now that kimchi’s ripening

How I long to live there

See that dog racing blindly

down the winding trail

See those children shouting

See the magpies perched at the tip

of that aspen bending in the wind

How I long to live there

Rejoice, cold and windy day

Rejoice most fully, here beneath the sky

For Tears (1990)

Fresh buds

I sprinkled seeds

here

Look at that!

Yesterday someone returned to clay

and this morning that person is reborn

like this, so

the ancient world is springing

fresh and green

Here at last

even I

even I washed drifting down

on rapid streams

am utter love

in the chill that follows harvest-time

Look! Look at that!

Pumpkin flower

For thirty-three years as a poet

I merrily defined beauty.

Without hesitation, each time,

I’d declare: beauty is like this. Or

this is a betrayal of beauty.

I went crazy over several different kinds

of aesthetic theory.

But beauty was never in any

of those aesthetic theories.

I was falling asleep

with the light on.

What fear in the days gone by.

From now on I’ll utterly refrain

from any definitions of beauty,

so define away!

Define away,

as if beauty can ever be defined!

All through weeks of summer rain

no flowers bloomed on the pumpkin creepers.

Now, the rains over,

at long last a flower has bloomed –

inside it a bee is quivering –

outside it I am quivering.

Pumpkin flower brimming full of life:

you are true beauty!

Kim Shin-muk

At ninety-six, Kim Shin-muk

said: When I die,

see me off with applause!

Then she died.

The day of the funeral

as her coffin was carried out

we all clapped,

everyone without exception clapped.

Coming down from the hills

after burying her there

we recalled her words:

Go back down clapping.

So a few people clapped.

The road between Tongduchon and Uijongbu

stretched glorious, not a Yank in sight!

Note: Kim Shin-muk was the mother of the dissident pastor Moon Ik-hwan.

Spies

Hey! Do you realize what loneliness

a spy has to endure?

Do you realize the loneliness involved

in hiding yourself from everyone?

And not only in hiding from everyone;

do you realize the loneliness involved

in not being able to tell a soul

about the country you are engaged to serve?

Then, arrested for morse-code communications,

condemned to death,

commuted to life imprisonment,

do you realize the long loneliness involved

in spending more than twenty years,

the long long loneliness day after day,

in a cramped cell with a wooden floor

and your hair already white?

Even more surprising, though, is the fact

that such loneliness is the fervor

of twenty years ago!

Although as time passed

that fervor all turned to dust,

they cannot let go

of that loneliness!

I ask you: which shall we call a tombstone,

and which a breath of air?

Your eloquence

Every time you make a speech,

every time your eloquence

is about to overwhelm your young hearers,

I get up and get out.

Because in your eloquence

there is utter assurance,

and not one hair of torment?

No!

Because in your eloquence

there is no true assurance at all.

Before I despise you, I despise

all those who go wild at your words.

On behalf of the heavens above.

Ten Thousand Lives (1986 - )

Grandmother

Cow eyes

those dull vacant eyes

my grandmother’s eyes.

My grandmother!

The most sacred person in the world to me.

A cow that has stopped grazing the fresh grass

and is just standing there.

But that’s not my grandmother after all!

It’s this world’s peace,

dead and denied a tomb.

New Year’s Full Moon

Bitter cold day, the new year’s first full moon,

a special day.

One housewife, busy from early morning,

knowing that beggars will be coming by,

puts out a pot of five-grain rice in anticipation

on the stone mortar

that stands beside her brush-wood gate,

with a single side-dish of plantain-shoots.

Soon, an ancient beggar comes breezing up,

makes ready to spin a yarn but finally

just pockets the rice and goes on his way.

If only every day of the year were like today!

His bag is soon bulging.

As he is leaving the village, his turn made,

he runs into another beggar:

glad encounter!

You’ve no call to go there, I’ve done’em all!

Let’s us celebrate a Fool Moon too!

Snapping dried twigs, they make a fire

to thaw themselves by, then

producing hunks of rice from this house and that,

the two beggars set to,

choking, laughing with mouths full.

Soon bands of magpies hear the news

and flock flapping around.

Old Foster-father

See that migrant lapwing perching on a branch!

There was an old man used to say

birds weren’t strangers either;

even when he was upset

he would never go on bitterly complaining,

although his cuffs were caked with dirt.

And his sons, the apples of his eye,

he lost them both:

one died of cholera,

the other fell into the water and drowned.

He could barely sigh; he had nothing to live for.

Then, once past forty,

he began collecting foster children, one after another;

there was one was about ten years old,

another who had lost both parents early on,

he took them all into his house,

made them his own, then sent them out at the proper time.

When harvest festival season came

unkind neighbors used to make sly remarks

about why does a man need so many foster children?

While to each the old man would dole out a measure

of fresh jujubes he had beaten from the tree

and simply answer in a quiet level voice:

If only you realized how precious people are!

Isn’t each person like a parent or a child?

And when that old man had done weeding

between the rows in his hillside bean-patch,

as he watched how the sluggish uphill-climbing breeze

overturned the bean-leaves with a flash of white,

he would mutter: Here, it’s that rogue’s birthday tomorrow,

better pop a middling hen in a bag presently

and call in there on the way back home;

he’s a growing lad: not good if he’s hungry, not good at all.

No-more’s mother

Three daughters had already been born

to No-more’s parents over in Kalmoi:

Tŏksuni

Boksuni

Kilsuni.

Then another daughter emerged; once again

the sacred straw stretched across the gate

held bits of charcoal, but no red peppers!

She got the name Ttalkŭmani, No-more-daughters.

Furious, No-more’s father went drinking;

when he came home, he declared:

A woman that can only have girls

deserves to be kicked out of the house!

He grabbed his wife by the hair,

although she had not yet fully recovered,

and dragged her outside,

smashing down the rotten fence.

Uhuhuh, he cried. A fine sight.

But oh the tasty red-pepper paste

that No-more’s mother makes!

How ever does she do it? Why, people come

from Namwŏn, and even from Sunch’ang,

eager to learn her pepper-paste art.

A few of the host of pepper-red dragonflies

that fill the clear late-autumn skies

often come down and perch on the heavy lids

of the bulging pots of red-pepper paste

up on the frugal storage platform

there behind the house;

the local women at the well,

with much smacking of lips, claim

that special pepper paste is made

by No-more’s mother and the red dragonflies,

working in collaboration!

On one such day, Sunch’ŏl’s ma came sneaking

into the bamboo-fenced back yard

to scoop out one bowl of the famous paste,

and as she did so, the daughter called Tŏksuni

happened to be there washing her back.

Struck by the sight of that abundant flesh

she murmured:

My! Sunch’ŏl dear, it’s Tŏksuni here

that you should marry! A hometown bride!

I never saw such a luscious girl!

The women from Sŏnjae

In darkest night, near midnight, the dogs

in the middle of Saet’o start to bark raucously.

One dog barks so the next one barks

until the dogs at Kalmoi across the fields

follow suit and start to bark as well.

Between the sounds the barking dogs produce

echo scraps of voices: eh ah oh...

Not unrelated to the sound the night’s wild geese

let fall to the bitter cold ground

as they fly past high above,

not unrelated to that backwards and forwards

echoing splendid sound.

It’s the women from Sŏnjae on their way home

from the old-style market over at Kunsan

where they went with garlic bulbs by the hundred

borne in baskets on their heads,

since there’s a lack of kimchi cabbages

from the bean-fields;

now they’re on their way home, after getting rid

of what couldn’t be sold

at the knock-down auction at closing time;

several miles gone

several left to go in deepest night!

The empty baskets may be light enough

but empty-stomached with nothing to eat,

I wonder just how light they feel?

Still, they don’t each one suffer on her own.

It’s a pain they share,

these plain simple people

these plain simple women.

What a good homely life!

Perhaps the dogs have got used to their voices,

for the barking starts to die away,

night seems eager to declare: I myself am night!

And the darkness blinks its vacant eyes.

Pyŏngok

If you’re born a yokel out in the backwoods,

once you’ve reached five or six

there’s no time left for play,

you’re forced to become a drudge

following your father,

with work piling up like the hills.

When autumn comes,

if mother tells you to bring home mud-snails

you go rushing out to the rice-paddy:

foraging for snails half a day

in the wide open spaces out there

is great, really great.

Being away from his rotten jobs is great.

Pyŏngok,

expert snail-catcher Pyŏngok,

drank lye by mistake and died.

None of the neighborhood kids knew

where he was buried.

If a kid dies there’s no tomb, no offerings,

there’ll be another one born by-and-by.

Pongt’ae

You and I vied for first place in grade-school.

You were from a rich house

had really nice clothes

your five buttons were always shining bright and

every day a boiled egg snuggled

bright in your lunch-box where the white rice

was only sprinkled with barley;

but you were never boastful, oh no,

not by so much as a finger-paring.

We had a paddy-field just beside yours.

Let’s you and I get on well together,

you said, and gave me dried rice-cakes.

But Pongt’ae,

first your father died

when the Reds pulled back north,

then you were dragged off by the local people;

you died in a cave in Halmi Mountain,

you died shot by a black UN soldier.

One moonlit night

in a dark cave you died.

Pongt’ae, ah,

I could do nothing to save you,

though you were sixteen

and I was sixteen.

Chaesuk

Chaesuk from the house by the well,

a brimming crock of water perched on her head,

gazes into the far-off distance

as she walks along:

the early autumn open road lies clear ahead.

Next year

Chaesuk will be leaving here.

Chaesuk’s heart swells in expectation.

Chaesuk, so like the darkness left

after the moon’s gone down!

The well

There’s a well beside that house.

A well more than ten fathoms deep,

there beside Pullye’s snug family house.

Pullye’s mother, bright as a gourd-flower,

and little Pullye, a lily-flower,

just the two of them live there together.

The mother a widow, young,

discreet in every word,

never dousing herself with water,

even in midsummer heat.

When I used to go on errands there,

if I took one sip of the blue-black water,

of that water’s silence and the dread

that Pullye’s mother,

letting down the heavy bucket,

drew up from her ten-fathom well,

my whole body would tremble, my heart would pound.

The twins’ mother

Pyŏnghyŏn and Pyŏngjin’s mother?

See her bare her dangling breasts

and go rushing around in all directions.

After the monsoons have demolished the outhouse,

not caring if the men folk see or not,

she bares her bottom in the millet-crunchy fields

and pisses freely. That kind of woman.

If there’s nothing to eat at home,

she grubs up a neighbor’s greens to cook.

What a woman!

If one of the twins

comes running home screaming

from being punched playing with the local kids:

A plague on you! Lightning strike you dead!

No one would think you were born

on fresh straw one midsummer dog-day!

How come you get beaten up all the time?

That’s how wild the twins’ mother is

and yet even such a woman must once have known

shy modest days of maidenhood,

those precious days!

Plum blossom

The house down Bird Lane where Omok lives

is only a tiny thatched cottage and yet

so spick and span,

lacking in nothing, be it

rice barley wheat soy-beans red-beans maize

sorghum millet and oats as well,

all the five or seven kinds of grain and corn,

all there:

the most frugal household around.

Omok’s mother:

such a careful housekeeper

with her hair tidy in a bun,

her apron never off.

When she winnows the rice

not one stray seed, sesame or millet,

escapes from the tossing.

In that house,

when winter is gone

and spring returns,

two plum-blossom trees

stand blooming,

so that although the house is empty

when the two are out working,

those trees make the house all brightness.

But alas, lament the pity of it!

One fine day or other some lucky fellow

will come marrying there

and carry off Omok, so like her mother,

he’ll carry her off on his back,

on his back; I hope he gets sore feet.

The ditch

Go and look in the ditch.

How friendly the water there is:

like an old lady.

Like a matronly lady

who has weathered a fair number of hardships.

All lies!

Chaenam’s little maid,

running errands to that far-off ditch,

fell in and drowned.

A child without a name,

without parents.

All the time everywhere her master’s eye watching,

she had no place to cry alone,

that child could never cry properly.

Go and look in the ditch.

It’s like that child.

The water that drowned that child

is like that child.

Hey, you there!

Setting to work long before the dawn chorus begins,

and only stopping at midnight

when the evening star is setting:

housework knows no glory, no end.

Field-work, now, or paddy field-work,

one, two, they have an end,

but for old Hankyu’s concubine’s maid

there’s no glory, no end.

A house with mountains of meals to prepare,

and tables of drinks to serve.

Just look at that girl, the sixth to go there:

can it already be two years ago?

It was the year of the great famine

so she thought herself lucky

to survive on scraps left-over from meals.

If she hears a call: Hey, you there!

even though she’s working round at the back,

she replies: Right away!

and comes running out to the yard in front;

or maybe she’s beside the pump, rinsing the washing in lye,

or wringing out a pile of clothes

rather bigger than herself, but

if she hears a call: Hey, you there!

she replies: Right away!

and hurries to where her mistress is.

From time to time local women say:

Still can’t you see? In another year’s time

you’ll be all knocked to bits!

Go somewhere else to find your meals,

else you’ll land one that’ll be the end of you!

But in one ear and out the other! Look!

Lowering a bucket into the well

at the end of that rope that must weigh a ton,

she nearly went down with the rope into the well!

Hey, you there!

Wuyŏl’s family house

The house at the back of Pongtae’s

belongs to Ko Wuyŏl.

And that house’s pigsty!

Why! you might go all over Korea

and not find one as clean as that,

so clean that if you dropped some food there,

not for pigs but for people,

they would eat it straight off the floor;

clean enough to make offerings

for honored ancestors in.

Ko Wuyŏl’s father?

Diligent as a new moon,

not a single weed growing anywhere about,

not a single cobweb.

What’s more, Wuyŏl’s mother

keeps everything so tidy indoors and out

that when the flies come swarming inside

with the first winter frosts,

you’ll never find more than a couple there.

And as for that house’s drainage outlet!

Well! is that a drain, or a mountain stream?

When spreading millet to dry, in other houses

they spread it out all mixed with leaves and dust,

but in that house’s yard a good straw mat

welcomes the sky’s visitation.

And Wuyŏl

with his younger sister

each seizing an old broom, they

clean everything spick-and-span before breakfast.

But

no one ever goes to that house

to borrow a handful of barley or rice.

And round at the back a pomegranate ripens

lonesome.

Headmaster Abe

Headmaster Abe Sudomu, from Japan:
a fearsome man, with his round glasses,
fiery-hot like the hottest pimentos.
When he clacked down the hallway
in slippers cut from a pair of old boots,
he cast a deathly hush over every class.
In my second year during ethics class
he asked us what we hoped to become.
Kids replied:
“I want to be a general in the Imperial Army!”
“I want to become an admiral!”
“I want to become another Yamamoto Isoroko!”
“I want to become a nursing orderly!”
“I want to become a mechanic in a plane factory
and make planes
to defeat the American and British devils!”
Then Headmaster Abe asked me to reply.
I leaped to my feet:
“I want to become the Emperor!”
Those words were no sooner spoken
than a thunderbolt fell from the blue:
“You have formally blasphemed the venerable name
of His Imperial Majesty: you are expelled this instant!”
On hearing that, I collapsed into my seat.
But the form-master pleaded,
my father put on clean clothes and came and pleaded,
and by the skin of my teeth, instead of being expelled,
I was punished by being sent to spend a few months
sorting through a stack of rotten barley
that stood in the school grounds,
separating out the still useable grains.
Every day I was imprisoned in a stench of decay
and there, under scorching sun and in beating rain,
I realized I was all alone in the world.
Soon after those three months of punishment were over,
during ethics class Headmaster Abe said:
“We’re winning, we’re winning, we’re winning!
Once the great Japanese army has won the war,
you peninsula people will go to Manchuria, go to China,
and take important positions in government offices!”
That’s what he said.
Then a b-29 appeared,
and as the silver four-engine plane passed overhead,
our Headmaster cried out in a big voice:
“They’re devils! That’s the enemy!” he cried fearlessly.
But his shoulders drooped.
His shout died away into a solitary mutter.
August 15 came. Liberation.
He left for Japan in tears.

Runny

Nobody’s around, they’re all out working.

A small kid left on his own squats

beneath the eaves, playing with a worm.

After that, once the worm’s gone,

he digs up some earth to gnaw,

and plays, just plays.

The whole village is empty.

One plump hen

is there on its own too.

The kid’s on his own too.

He’s not been put on the family register yet,

not even been given a name but

he often has the runs so he’s called Runny, Runny.

After playing there alone

he falls asleep on the bare ground

then the shade moves away, so he wakes up

and cries a bit.

Nobody knows he’s crying

but

that’s not loneliness, it’s belief.

Belief he’ll grow up okay though left on his own.

Belief he’s at one with this world

though he plays on his own.

How else would they dare?

Poor little Runny!

How else would they dare?

Lee Chongnam

When children cry, if you tell them:

A roaring tiger will come,

a big tiger will come

and carry you off if you cry!

the crying goes on;

but if you say:

They’ll take you to Sinpung-ri police box!

then the crying stops as if by magic.

And grown-ups too,

when they pass before Sinpung-ri police box

with the three trays of eggs they’re selling,

they feel as if they’ve stolen them somewhere, and

their hearts beat two or three times faster than normal.

One fellow who simply took to his heels

as he went by was called in: Hey, you!

by a Japanese cop, and had a hard time.

I had a fright going by there once, too,

as I was following uncle Hongsik

on the way to sell dried pine branches down at the wood store.

A man was coming out with a messed-up face,

his hands tied behind his back.

He was being transferred to Kunsan central police station.

Someone was marching along behind him, holding the rope.

And who was that? The police box cat’s paw, that’s who,

Lee Chongnam, brother-in-law to our grandfather’s niece.

That wicked man!

He kicked his wife in the stomach and made her abort.

He turned on his own father and pulled his beard.

But where the Japs were concerned, he was down on his knees,

on his knees and crawling, he was so crazy about them!

At Liberation he should have been first to get it,

but he hid for a while, and when he came out

he was put in charge of Sinpung-ri police box.

He dressed himself up in a policeman’s cap and uniform,

and put on airs riding around the district on a bicycle:

tring-a-ling, tring-a-ling, Out of my way!

Firefly

Summertime firefly, you’re a simpleton;

you go dashing through life like an arrow, then die.

And you’re the female simpleton that takes him

and has his kids.

Young Sunt’ae and Chaehwan’s little girl

used to catch fireflies

and put them inside a gourd flower as a lantern

then with that feeble light

they used to play at husbands and wives

and nighttime housekeeping.

Time passed

and Chaehwan’s daughter married a Kunsan stationer

while Suntae remained an old bachelor, and went

to prison for assaulting someone when he was drunk.

Childhood things all left behind,

one of them became just an ordinary housewife

and gave birth to a few babies,

the other was taken into custody, judged,

and put on prison garb.

But one day another old bachelor

got put in the same prison cell.

Lo and behold, he came from the house

next door to the Kunsan stationer’s store.

Talking and talking,

at last the talk turned to the housewife there.

Her husband, he said, had given her four kids

and yet he’d been with the bargirl too

and made her a baby as well,

and every time he came home drunk

he would knock his wife all over the floor;

at which Sunt’ae’s eyes filled with tears.

God forbid! As soon as I get out of here

I’ll tear off his prick, and his balls as well!

But after a year in prison the firmest resolves

all just vanish into thin air, you know.

Nightingales sing, then fly away.

The Petticoat Thief

The thief got into the kitchen,

hungrily gobbled up the left-over rice,

left a generous mound of shit

and then

rummaged through the dresser in the outer room

and made off with one gold hairpin,

one calico suit of clothes,

and two petticoats.

The next morning Kil-sŏp’s mother, finding she had been robbed,

threw open the kitchen door

and poured out curses as she cleaned up the shit:

“Aigu! You cursed thief, like a pilchard’s guts!

What thief would take petticoats?

Aigu! You petty-minded wretch, you dirty-minded rogue,

Aigu! and you call yourself a man, with such wretched

balls as yours?

Who ever stole petticoats from someone’s house?

Filthy thing, filthy.”

Yun Isang

“Go and reveal the Orient.”

Such was the command he received from the Dragon King below the sea.

So one wounded dragon was born.

So it set out.

That dragon came back as a prisoner

‘invited’ to the National Independence Day Ceremony.

That dragon thrust its head into the fetters on the prison-cell walls.

With his last strength in a suicide in rejection of murder

he wrote a last message with his spurting blood.

“My son, before history and our people

I am ashamed of nothing. The spying incident was a fabrication . . . .”

His life was saved from the very brink of death.

Then came the winter of prison for life.

In the cell where his drinking water would freeze

the dragon lay sprawled on the floor,

its shoulders hunched,

wrapped in a blanket.

He dreamed of the butterflies of Changzhu on the banks of the Yangtze.

His scores survived.

Thunder rolled,

all crumbled,

and lay desolate.

The outside world venerated his music

with full-dress reverence.

Could he perhaps be Mahler’s successor?

Note: The celebrated composer Yun Isang spent the later years of his life in Germany. On account of his sympathies for Socialism and the regime in North Korea, he was never welcome in the South and for many years his music could not be performed there.

The Novice at Songgwang Temple

In the mid Choson period,

when Buddhism was active high in the mountains,

hearing that the head monk

at Songgwang Temple in Chogye Mountain

was encouraging monastic practice, renowned in the Way,

a begging monk came from the North to see him.

Below the temple the river turns into a stream

and as he climbed up beside the stream

one cabbage leaf came floating down on the water.

The wandering monk, seeing that, exclaimed:

“Why, I’ve come on a fool’s errand.

What kind of virtue,

what kind of teaching

can I expect to find in a temple

that does not know how to treasure sacred offerings,

the goods of the community?”

And he turned tail, back down the way he had come.

Just then a little novice monk

came rushing panting down

from above:

“Monk sir, Monk sir, Monk sir!

On your way up from below did you not

happen to notice one cabbage leaf floating down?”

he asked with what seemed his last breath.

“Well, I did see one.

Well, yes actually it should be this way.”

The wandering monk reversed his steps once again,

painstakingly

made his way to Samil hermitage among the Chogye forest,

stood before the head monk’s door

and requested instruction.

Just then heavy drops of rain began to fall

from clouds covering the whole of Chogye Mountain.

The birds busily flew away.

The head monk’s door opened.

And would you believe it,

the cute little novice he had met just before,

who had come racing after the cabbage leaf, emerged:

“Why rain has come

and a guest has come.

A guest has come

and rain has come.”

What? (1991)

Walking Down a Mountain

Looking back

Hey!

Where’s the mountain I’ve just come down?

Where am I?

The autumn breeze tosses and turns lifeless

like a cast-off snake-skin.

Memories

Waiting decades for one snowflake

my body of charcoal has glowed

glowed and gone out.

The cicadas have stopped singing.

Clothes

King Ashoka brought a suit of clothes

Manjushri hid away.

No help for it

King Asoka went back home

and put the suit on.

Then he saw that “river is river”.

A Drunkard

I’ve never been an individual entity.

Sixty trillion cells!

I’m a living collectivity

staggering zigzag along.

Sixty trillion cells! All drunk.

Sitting

If you sit Buddha dies mother dies.

Don’t sit.

Don’t stand.

All five oceans six continents

even

that cinnamon tree in the bright moonlight

here and there are all a boiling cauldron

with nowhere to put your feet down.

What’s to be done?

Late Summer

Into water. Splash!

Into flames.

Eek, hot!

I go bouncing on like this

while berries ripen beyond.

A Sudden Shower

Several billion Buddhas pouring down.

The brook busy babbling.

In addition

to the Buddha corpses

other corpses are floating down too.

Real cool.

Dayfly

Three hundred-millionths of a second.

If that’s how long one particle lasts

think how endless one day is.

You think a day’s too short?

Greedy thing.

A Phantom

The deer have grown really long horns.

Now the autumn breeze

has got caught on their horns

and can’t budge an inch.

What’s that passing over the hill? Hey you!

A Friend

Hey! With the mud you dug out

I modeled a Buddha.

It rained.

The Buddha turned back into mud.

Clear skies after rain are pointless.

The Moon

The bow taut.

Twang!

The arrow strikes

your eye.

By the pain of your darkness the moon rose.

Ah, over there some lepers are playing their pipes.

A Green Frog

One green frog.

Black clouds are filling the sky.

Just because you croaked.

What a Hercules.

You squirt.

Ripples

Look! Do all the ripples move

because one ripple starts to move?

No.

It’s just that all the ripples move at once.

Everything’s been askew from the start.

A Kind of Catastrophe

One kind of bird eats up its mother.

The mother hatching and feeding her chick

feeds her own death.

Like mother, like chick.

Eating up mother

is the natural thing for mother and chick.

One Day

Lightning over the hill in front

thunder over the hill behind

between the two

one dumb pebble.

Old Buddha

Hey, were you talking about old Buddha?

Why, old Buddha’s no Buddha.

Real Buddha’s a fish just netted,

still leaping and struggling.

A Stone in a Bank Between Two Fields

Aha, real Buddha’s outdoors.

The future world?

It’s opening like this

partly inside partly out.

And all the live-long day

cuckoos chant prayers.

Reeds in Cheju Island

Early November. Cheju reed fields

white with tufted reeds

a scarecrow in the middle.

It’s watching the sea. The sea’s watching it.

Moon

What’s that? We only have to look at the moon?

Forget about “the finger pointing at the moon”?

You knucklehead!

Who cares if you forget moon and finger?

Heavy Rain

Rain pouring down all day long

not a beast left in sight.

Alright!

You guys! Come on out!

Come out and play in the rain.

You must. The day after tomorrow it’s the sky’s turn.

Sea Diamond Mountain (1991)

Gazing up at Nogodan

I haven’t climbed Nogodan Ridge today.

I haven’t trekked up

and looked across at Panya Peak.

I’m simply standing gazing up

at Nogodan

from the marketplace in Kurye,

just as I did as a traveler aged twenty.

Aha, yes, and up there somewhere

high on a crag, a bear

is looking down intently on everything here.

Neither aware of the other.

A really deep relationship, no?

No regrets!

Note: Nogodan is a high ridge (1507 meters) at the southwestern edge of the mountain range known as Chiri-san (Mt. Chiri / Chiri Mountain) that fills the central part of the southernmost regions of Korea, South Cholla Province and South Kyongsang Province. Panya Peak (1728m) is the second-highest peak, not far from Nogodan to the north-east, nearer the central part of the mountain range. Kurye is a small town at the foot of Nogodan. Ko Un has returned here on his endless journey around Korea that began when he was a young monk of twenty. He is still a traveler.

There are no recorded sightings of wild bears on Nogodan (or any other South Korean mountain) in modern times but nothing is more familiar to Koreans than the association of bears and mountains. The Korean foundation‑myth of Tangun features the transformation of a bear into a human being in a mountain cave. In some ways the bear in this poem represents Nogodan Ridge itself.

The Upper Reaches of Sŏmjin River

I want to travel

to that sandbar all by itself in the stream.

Where could you find a country its equal?

My Father’s Cousin

“I’ll tell you once;

I won’t tell you a second time,”

my father’s cousin used to say.

He was the youngest.

The other cousins

had died of disease

or during the war.

He was the only one to survive.

When I visited our home village

he would take charge of me,

dragging me up and down one hill after another :

“This is the grave of our great‑great‑grandfather’s grandmother,

this is the grave of our great grandfather,

this is where your foster‑grandfather lies,

here your eldest great uncle,

and here your middle great uncle,

that’s to say the father of your dad’s cousin, Ch’ŏng‑suk.

So long as I’m around,

someone knows all these grave‑sites

but once I’m gone

no one will be able to tell one from another.”

Then we’d come back down,

trading shots of liquor,

ending up drunk,

him repeating the same words,

the exact same words,

always repeating :

“I’ll tell you once;

I’ll not tell you a second time.”

In his whole lifetime,

he never once left his native town,

never went anywhere except

his wife’s family home,

the market place next to the harbor,

the district office,

the primary school for sports day.

Father’s cousin lived entirely in his native place.

Does anything ever change there?

Will things ever change?

There are times

in this world when people need change.

To those ambitious enough

there must be change, casting off life so far lived,

to be born anew.

In the midst of changes

it’s easy for such a person to get brought down

in extremely cowardly ways,

extremely offensive ways,

as the butt of people’s foolish ridicule.

Such people get kicked by the world

and crawl off on all fours

to weep alone.

Today as I chopped away at a living tree,

my first hard work in a long while,

breaking into a sweat,

I glimpsed my own death.

That tree, its trunk ten inches in girth,

cracked as it toppled.

A breeze sprang up. My sweat chilled.

Note: “Trading shots of liquor” because they would have taken a bottle of rice wine and a cup with them, with which to make an offering in front of each of the tombs.

Rooks

Cloudy skies.

Don’t just hang there, content to be skies!

Dip down, enamored of that boy seen at Namwŏn

riding a bike and towing a second alongside.

Here, one wintry midday, a flock of rooks is settling.

The bare furrows in the fields, now freezing now melting,

rejoice, rejoice,

and dry grass flutters.

Ten

The greatest age

is when you can only count as far as ten.

Once you can go on to eleven, twelve,

misfortune starts, inevitably.

Ah! One child at dawn by the sea.

Wild Lilies on Nogodan Ridge

Are they neighbors of the dark

beneath the sea off Sohuksan Island?

How can that patch of wild lilies on Nogodan Ridge

be so alone?

Is that why every sea

is inlaid with wavy ridges,

as they blossom and wither?

Note: Nogodan Ridge is the westernmost peak of Chiri Mountain.

Standing on the Suspension Bridge at Namhae

Why should I bother going to Namhae

to visit Kŭmsan or Bori Hermitage?

Stopping,

I gaze down at the water

under the bridge.

I imagine an animal rising to its feet

after giving birth.

I imagine a few of that old animal’s kids.

I throw a stone into the water.

From far below,

I hear nothing.

Plop-splash!

No such sound.

I long to ask those new-born kids :

What were you born for?

Note: Kŭmsan (Kum Mountain) and Bori Hermitage are places, well‑known for their beauty, near the city of Namhae, which lies on an island just off the southern coast of Korea, surrounded by many other islands. It is connected to the mainland by an impressive suspension bridge.

Warning

Today four hundred million Asians and Africans

go hungry.

Look closer

at all those starving people in Bangladesh,

in Cameroon:

they

are humanity’s ultimate image.

You Yankees, you Yanks

and Japanese --

they are your image,

tomorrow.

But isn’t tomorrow already today?

Writing

What is writing, really?

Once I replied

writing is hell.

African pygmy children emerge

from huts made of leaves,

without knowing a single letter.

Once I replied

the pygmy children are hell.

Those children are hell by their illiteracy

while I am hell by my ten thousand books.

Ill-advised, those who think this world is nirvana

A Few Quick Words

At last I understand what blank margins are.

Margins are not incompleteness,

nor the familiar spaces left untouched by the brush

in old Korean ink paintings, either.

In valleys where desire for completeness has melted,

there ‑‑ yes, there ‑‑

they arrive before tomorrow dawns.

Ah, chaste omission of action.

Margins have nothing bourgeois about them.

Bourgeois? Never.

Neither are margins

cowardly pauses in battle.

Beyond battle

they form part of a face

so far never met,

neither friend nor foe.

Vast distance, skirts

fragrant,

so fragrant,

never hurrying.

Brother, the mightiest of powers is not America,

it’s the margins in the millennia of human history.

Oh, the pain echoing in my heart!

Necessarily, part of the cosmos is being reborn.

But not the whole thing.

Brother, the whole thing is vicious.

Winter Journey

Do you think you can make it through winter

without knowing the fragrance in the winter wind?

Beneath the ground

frogs and snakes

dream of that fragrance --

really strange.

Really strange --

that’s the place you’ll end up.

Really strange!

A Bell

As I sped down the highway along the East Sea

the sound of a bell suddenly reached my ears.

Between the waves endlessly booming,

the sound of a church bell at crack of dawn

reached my ears.

Kwŏn Chong-saeng’s bell in a valley near Andong.

Ah, in a dream!

No, not a dream,

but not reality, either.

Yes, in a dream!

That distant bell rings in my ear. . .

maybe

in today’s world, your poverty is paradise. . .

oh, bell rung by Kwŏn Chong-saeng.

Note: Kwŏn Chong-saeng is a children’s writer who has spent his life in great poverty in the region of Andong. For a time his only paid job was to ring the bell of a small village church.

Odong Island in Yŏsu Harbor

It’s not the Palace at Versailles

that’s supremely beautiful, you know.

After all, where in the world can you find

anything that truly corresponds

to the dark beauty contained

within your heart?

Here, before the camellias

on Odong Island in Yŏsu Harbor,

looking out at the sea

lost in a grove of camellia trees --

that’s real sorrow.

Sorrow, beginning of beauty : I must leave you here.

Note: Yŏsu is on the south coast of Korea and in its harbor lies Odong Island which is famous for the grove of camellia trees covering it.

Early Morning

Ah, my enemy!

Not darkness

but the sun.

The sun squeezes between us, makes it impossible

to exchange quiet glances, chins on hands.

After foam-like splendor comes

bedazzlement,

far from sincerity.

Ah, my enemy,

my awakening!

Experience at Pŏpsŏng-p’o

The Ch’ilsan Sea is shimmering brightly.

Yet there are creatures

in this world that hate the light.

Their darkness

pushed me from behind,

forcing me down into the sea.

But strong waves rose in front of me

and drove me back.

“Not you! Not you!”

What use are humans?

So far humans

have killed everything

and called that either culture or civilization.

“Not you.”

The sea rejected me.

“Not you.”

Note : Pŏpsŏng‑p’o is a port on the west coast of South Chŏlla Province.

Heavy snow

On days of heavy snow

even the animals

quietly withdraw into their homes

despite their gnawing hunger.

I stay home too.

Once there is heavy snow

our country has no need of religion.

My goodness, our country’s religion’s a creepy thing.

On Ch’ŏnwang Peak

I climbed Ch’ŏnwang Peak

and as I surveyed what lay spread below,

the wind suddenly swept off my hat

and I became a son.

A sea of clouds spread in all directions.

“Father! Father!” I cried

but got no reply.

The wind tried to tear off my clothes.

Note: Ch’ŏnwang Peak is the highest peak in Chiri Mountain

Springtime

The land of my birth

has never reared a traitor.

Yet always

there had to be traitors,

to be judged by those who did not betray.

Without them

we would not know what judgment is.

As a child of this land

I was duly drenched

in morning dew,

slipping and falling,

speeding after rainbows.

I grew up amidst an immensity of love

until I was eighteen years old

but those who betrayed the land of my birth

did not belong to just one generation,

were not few in number.

Now spring has come

and despite all those betrayals,

under the skybound skylarks soaring high,

the land of my birth is still the same.

Ah, clusters of sprouting larkspur!

Willow leaves!

What is this feeling, if not love for the land of my birth?

Note: When the poet was 18, in 1951-2, he experienced at first hand the horrors of war and contemplated suicide, before becoming a Buddhist monk.

My Song

After much too long a time had passed

I finally stood on the slopes of T’aebaek Mountain.

Why, how repulsive : someone a hundred years old!

In this country of ours,

in this country’s winters,

it’s children we need.

We need children, standing taller every day.

T’aebaek Mountain, here in my dear native land!

Because of my sin, since I have not done as I ought,

our country employs two million bar hostesses,

so here I cast away my songs,

put to death all the songs I’ve sung so far

and give birth to a completely new song.

Ah, my truth, you have accomplished nothing.

Now freeze to death here,

like the pollack hung on poles to dry,

without a single song.

Note: T’aebaek Mountain lies near the east coast. In winter, pollack are taken up into the mountain valleys to dry in the icy winter air.

An Island off Sea Diamond Mountain

Will you go rushing off, if someone calls you here?

Will you go rushing off, if someone calls you there?

Shine on,

pure white island off Sea Diamond Mountain.

By the eons of your presence there,

I’m still strong.

Note : Sea Diamond Mountain is in North Korea, at the point on the east coast near the DMZ where the Diamond Mountain massif drops into the sea.

One Day

Off on a journey without my family,

the moment I rose in the morning

I swept the sandy yard of a house

in Taejin, the northernmost harbor in South Korea.

I felt extremely shabby before my compatriots.

All morning long the sunlight

shone fiercely on the sea off Taejin

and rose up again in blinding light.

I could not open my eyes.

In the dazzling glare

I renounced party politics and solitude once and for all.

Evening came,

the distant horizon appeared.

A distant horizon

inevitably makes this world more precious.

Putting on my coat, I realized :

soaring high,

high in the dark

was not today

but tomorrow.

The owner of the house spoke up :

“Let’s go inside and play some cards.”

Untitled

Here’s an old-fashioned poem of the kind written before 1950,

usually called “Untitled.”

One day I took a pebble from

an East Sea beach and put it in my pocket

but it shrieked and jumped back out.

As it hurtled off into the distance,

it failed to say anything.

It had no idea of the gratitude I was expecting.

Out at sea there are flocks of seagulls,

ready to peck out and swallow facile words.

Along the East Coast

As I traveled along the east coast,

I gazed at the sea’s perfection

and rid myself of mother.

I was no longer mother’s son,

I was a completely different son.

But no one should stir up too big a fuss.

Here and there stand virgin pine groves

bent and battered

for centuries by sea gales.

Here and there lie graceful, so graceful fields.

There are times in this life for shutting and locking doors,

and times for throwing doors wide open,

bringing everything out into the sea breeze.

As I passed the DMZ, Taejin, Kojin, Yangyang, Sŏkjo, Kangnŭng,

slipping past the East Sea horizon

as far as Mukho

or farther, as far as Uljin

and on as far as Yŏng’il Bay at P’ohang,

the sea never for a single moment

lost any of its perfection,

never frightened by anything.

Finally, I surrendered.

As I traveled beside the East Sea,

passing along the east coast,

a rainbow brilliance came bursting forth from Buddha’s relics

enshrined at Kŏnbong Temple

high in the South Diamond Mountains!

That, and only that

was what my heart felt

about the entire East Sea.

Finally, the East Sea filled my whole body,

and now, as I drop toward night,

I am nothing to you but the sound of waves.

Nothing but the sound of waves burying you and me together.

Ah, tomb so much more venerable than birth!

Note: The place-names form an itinerary down the east coast of Korea from the DMZ (demilitarized zone) between North and South Korea as far as the industrial city of Pohang. The massif known as the Diamond Mountains rises from the sea just to the north of the DMZ, in North Korea, but a final range of it (the “South Diamond Mountains) extends to the south, over the DMZ, and there, just outside Taejin, lies the site of Kŏnbong Temple, one of the greatest temples in Korea, which was destroyed during the Korean War.

A Cry

Sunlight,

our much-traveled friend,

reaches us from

one hundred and fifty million kilometers away,

(to say nothing of starlight’s hundreds of light years,

or gamma rays from thousands of light years away),

a friend, coming all that way

to guide our lives and dreams.

Where could we find another friend like that?

Yet sunlight

cannot penetrate the sea around us.

After piercing a few hundred meters

it’s stopped.

Light’s long journey

comes to an end, in the dark.

In that dark,

in place of sunlight

the creatures idly swaying under the sea

make light

by their voices alone.

There’s no other way.

Even on dry ground, in the dark

we’re obliged to make light by our voices.

At this moment, on account of one

feeble, far-off cry,

my ear is prevented from sleeping,

like all my soul-mates in the world.

Dragon

At 11 in the morning on January 3, 1991,

high in the sky between Mounts Sŏun

and Hŭksŏng in the Cha’ryŏng Range,

white clouds and charcoal-black clouds hung

clustered together, now bending their bodies,

now twisting and drooping,

then rising up to the crown of the sky’s head.

I stood staring up,

transfixed.

It was like tomorrow in Laos or Cambodia.

I stood transfixed.

Last night in my dreams

I was thrashed with a magnificent fin,

even my scars were thrashed.

Then a piece of that harsh tail

detached, fell off, and

hurriedly

rose up into the sky

but this

was today in broad daylight.

I whispered in my daughter’s ear :

“It’s a dragon, it’s a dragon.

“Before the special era that will surely come after today,

it’s a dragon.”

Once it had vanished, a blizzard came,

erasing everything far and near.

The Miyang plains around our home in Ansŏng,

those empty plains,

lay desolate in snowdrifts,

not one blighted ear of corn in sight.

“It’s a dragon.

It’s a dragon,” I declared.

The words emerged

from my lips,

my mouth desolate

in snowdrifts.

Oh, Africa! Oh, Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro!

Earthworms

The sky is not the only thing sublime.

For centuries now, people

have only gazed up, at the sky

pointlessly.

Earthworms are my choice, under the ground.

There is such glory under the ground I stand on ‑‑

the soles of my two feet are unspeakably happy!

Tomorrow morning at crack of dawn,

on the frozen ground,

in the dark,

I’ll be a cock and crow.

I’ll tear the sky open.

Yong’il Bay

Thirty years ago

it was like a mother to me.

Boundlessly,

like my friend’s mother.

Twenty years ago

it was my mother.

I was helpless.

“Mother,

Mother.”

I used to shout.

Today

the factories have killed my mother.

Now,

I have no mother

to greet you, sun and moon.

And since I have no mother,

I have no dreams, no matter how long I sleep.

For millennia now, sand

has been announcing the end of the world.

Who has understood

that those grains of sand

were once the mother of every man and beast?

Note: Yong’il Bay is on the east coast of Korea, it shelters Pohang which has in recent decades become home to one of the largest iron and steel foundries in the world. The resulting level of pollution may easily be imagined, in what was previously a site famed for its natural beauty and the purity of its waters.

Yesterday 1

Morning glory flowers,

morning glory flowers

bloom in the morning.

The balsam flowers round Suni’s house

bloom in the evening.

The evening primrose

sleeps all day

then, when the time is right,

as the new moon rises,

blooms all night,

calling: “Here I am,”

soaked with chill dew.

The roof of Ch’ori’s house,

a lonely house,

is likewise soaked with chill dew,

unknown, unknown to anyone.

Yesterday 2

Mokswei told me : “Become a tiger.

Turn into a tiger

and go roaring up mountain valleys.”

Chantol told me : “Become a squid.

Turn into a squid

and swim across the East Sea to Ullŭng Island.”

It was still broad daylight,

but Sooki with his bobbed hair told me :

“Become a cricket,

turn into a cricket that sings all night.”

So first I became a tiger,

then a squid,

then a cricket chirping.

Then as we made our way home,

Mokswei and Chantol,

and my pal Suki too,

we all turned into calves

and lowed

as calves should :

Moo.

The old cow in Ch’ŏl-su’s stable

chewing its cud, turned its head and stared.

Song of Tomorrow (1992)

Tomorrow

Through the tough days of pain

tomorrow was my only verdant honor,

sole source of any strength I had left,

as I waved

a final farewell

at each waning day.

Was that real?

This? That?

That again?

If love and hate,

and the land of my father,

were only things of today

beneath the starlight fireworks

of countless nights past, then

let glasses stay empty,

offer no more toasts.

Tomorrow.

Isn’t it a magnificent name!

Oh, ragged destiny ‑‑

though dazzling flesh

and dictatorship

may now be one,

see beyond affairs of today,

to where is already streaming

in the wind, without fanfare, like a lone child:

tomorrow!

Note: All the poems in Songs of Tomorrow are inspired by the hope that soon (“tomorrow”) the two Koreas will be reunited. They were published following the signature of an agreement between North and South Korea in 1991.

Horizon

The Yellow Sea lies due west.

People live here too, on Och’ong Island.

The sea, glimpsed above the top of the dike

where not a single flower can be seen,

is itself one endless flower.

The woman in one lonely house

is preparing rice and side-dishes in the kitchen.

She abruptly emerges,

sweeps her hair up

and gazes intently toward the west.

A few boats can be seen

looming just above the horizon :

That’s the boat!

No doubt about it, that’s the boat!

She knows for sure it’s her husband’s boat.

Her voice changes at once.

Sangsop! Sangsop!

Yongsop! Yongsun!

Your dad’s coming!

A mighty voice.

Note : Och’ong‑do (Och’ong Island) lies off the coast of North Cholla Province.

Again Today

There are times when we have to reflect on today

rather than yesterday, which is

nothing but death.

Beasts are so free,

with their unreflecting day-to-day lives!

While we, from time to time,

must reflect on today.

What am I today?

Alas, I am less than a beast.

Somewhere between a reflecting

and an unreflecting thing,

turning in fettered paths. What

am I?

The strong beams

of the morning sun, already growing old,

couldn’t thaw everything

and evening hastens near,

when all will freeze again.

But I’ll strike such days dead.

What am I? Before,

I was a cudgel, a thunderbolt

pregnant with tomorrow.

I tread the hard, frozen ground.

The icy starlight shines bright because of me.

And all that time, today was so vast.

One Day’s Song

One day I realized :

my sorrows

were a sign

that our age has no mind.

I could not stand the thought

that different things

always give rise to new ideologies.

I long to be caught up in that eternal fiction

called mind, unknown to birds or mice.

The isolation of mind rises

like a kite a kid sends flying high.

I long to plunge in the breeze.

A Yard at Night

The kids have been playing boisterously in the yard,

even kids from the neighboring village.

Somehow the dogs didn’t bark,

just wagged their tails.

The whole village has been playing noisily,

even the banished chicks and hens.

It was no place for adults

with their coughs of alarm.

Hopscotch, kick-the-shuttlecock, scissors-paper-stone,

to say nothing of racing to the spring,

winning, losing, time knowing no end.

No need to worry about the kids while they’re here.

No need for mother, in her wet apron,

to keep coming and going to see if they’re alright.

The noisy play is fine, just fine.

No trace of any other world at all.

Why should tomorrow or the day after ever come?

The children, there were ten or twenty of them,

the whole country is full of kids like these.

Then the Beggar’s Star shone early in the sky.

After twilight, came night.

It became hard to recognize each other’s faces

and one by one they set off homewards.

Thank heaven children have names!

“Illyŏng-a, Samryŏng-a, Kuryŏng-a, Mansŏp-a!”

Especially, that children have names in the dark.

Behind them the chicks flap up to their perches

in the coop, defying hunger. Just before,

they were pecking hungrily at one another.

In the empty yard, where have the noisy games all gone?

Over the not‑so‑very‑lofty mountain,

other stars rise, freely following

the Beggars’ Star, announcing their presence

by the little light they can muster.

How could the world beyond not be here?

All night long the wind sleeps, dew falls,

while the other world comes, plays, then goes.

When the first cock crows at early dawn,

the others follow suit from house to house.

It’s a time for blind folks to gaze off into the distance.

In their sleep the children are still kicking off the blankets,

growing up to be sleepy-heads just like their fathers.

Exhortation

What times we have seen!

Truly, by a few

sincere words

we overcame half a lifetime’s poverty.

Exchanging those few words --

Ah, really? Ah, really?

all unawares, night

and the stars have fled.

The east is bright with an unfamiliar glow.

Have we parted from those stars?

Let’s resolve

to follow them

no longer. There are

so many other places,

other places so beautiful,

and people can go there.

The mere thought of this will set

waters free to flow.

We resolved to remain in the obscurity

of a secret joy, like the soft flesh inside a sea-shell,

transcending the giddy mingling of our feelings with

this world’s beauty.

But now, since there is no choice,

everyone should go on moving with the stars,

into the beauty of another place,

towards a place where,

if the unfamiliar speech of another place

goes on long enough,

that speech becomes our own.

Establish a home for your descendants there.

Despite the hardship involved in shifting mounds of rock,

build houses for posterity

on the new dark ground

revealed when you shift those rocks,

each moment echoing with hammering as those houses rise!

The Front of a Tree

Regard

people’s backs.

If God exists in this world,

that’s what God would look like.

Each and every tree

has its front and back too.

Not necessarily a matter of sunlight,

not necessarily a matter of north and south.

You meet a tree face to face,

you leave its back behind you –

then if you begin to miss it,

though it’s a tree unable to say one word,

if it hears you say you love it

its leaves will rustle more strongly in the breeze.

Next year its leaves

will be a more dazzling green,

and once summer is over

it will bear

red leaves no one can match,

red leaves no one can break away from,

no matter what breaks occur

between one person and another.

The Woman of Kago Island

If we are at all human

there is always some spot we can never forget.

I discovered such a place

last summer

on Kago Island in the Western Sea, my clothes

nearly tearing in the fierce sea winds.

And in those winds grew a tough shrub,

beach verbena, with slender stalks

sending roots down as deep as its height,

standing firm.

And in those winds was the voice of a woman

who lost her husband at sea early on in life

but stayed there with her children,

celebrating his memorial rites once a year.

No matter how strong the winds might blow,

her voice sliced through them

as she called out briskly

to her big fifteen‑year‑old son’s tiny boat ‑‑

unsure whether, across the waves,

she was calling her dead husband

or her son.

Windy Day

The greatest treason

is to die on a windy day.

When the wind blows,

all the land is full of banners,

everyone,

everyone is turned into a banner.

If someone dies on such a day, bid them :

Arise.

Arise!

Arise!!

Bid even the word “fallen” : arise!

The most glorious thing

in all the world?

A windy day.

Arirang

One day in 1937, Siberian Koreans

were forcibly loaded onto trucks,

then onto the Trans-Siberian railway,

traveled for ten days, a fortnight,

along the shores of Lake Baikhal,

five thousand dying one by one,

their bodies thrown out, as they traveled on,

until at last : “Where are we?”

They had reached the deserts of Alma Atta.

“You Kareskis are to live here.”

With that, the trucks that had brought them

drove away empty.

The towering Tien Shan Mountains far to the south

were white with snow.

Before and behind them stubbly bare ground.

They arranged their cooking pots in holes in the ground

and began to live in the midst of death.

Sixty harsh years passed,

two generations, three.

Their children took names like Natalia Kim,

Illiytch Park.

One was called Anatoly Kang

and by his eleventh year

had mastered the balalaika.

One day he was given the music

of the Korean song “Arirang.”

After scanning it once,

he plucked out the tune and began singing :

Arirang, arirang, arariyo...

It was amazing : as the child sang,

he felt sorrow he’d never known before.

Tears rose in his eyes.

Never before had he felt such sorrow.

It was the first time he had ever sung “Arirang”

yet in that song,

full of all his ancestors’ sorrow,

was something from which he could never be severed,

whence all the tears he shed.

Is that blood? or a song? or what?

Arirang, arirang, arariyo. . .

Note: The forced transfer of thousands of ethnic Koreans from their ancestral home in Siberia to far worse living conditions in the Mongolian steppes is one among the many crimes of Stalin. The Russians called those Koreans “Kareskis”. The traditional song Arirang is the most popular song in Korea, it exists in dozens of different versions. The word Arirang, combined with the variant Arariyo forms the song’s refrain, there are various conflicting opinions as to what it means. The song evokes the yearning of separated lovers.

An Unfamiliar Spot

Leave

for some unfamiliar spot.

Not America

not Indonesia.

Leave

your daily routines,

your never-to-be-forgiven habits,

leave

for the newness of words invented by infants,

that newness that calls grandmother “alupa,”

yes, for a place where even a grandmother

is something new,

for that unfamiliar spot,

throwing away all your memories and dictionaries,

throwing away even your empty hands.

Leave

the very act of leaving.

Leap over your rebirth,

in a primal birth : leave.

To a Young Poet

The sun is nearest to any young poet.

Have you swallowed soma, then?

Why are you so lacking in sorrow?

Why so lacking in immaculate despair?

Those are not things limited to the ruins of the 1950s.

The days may be past when those were the only values

but nowadays they are surely your first steps?

In those days those things were a fool’s whole being

nowadays they are only first steps.

Anxiety, anguish, even suffering were sweet.

Such things will make your poetry leap,

such things will make your life

zoom

quick as an arrow shot from the bow.

Why can’t you see?

Without such things

you can never hope to see great tomorrows.

Why can’t you see?

Rather than the waterfall’s might,

consider one tiny fish leaping up over the waterfall.

Begin in the clouds three million feet in the sky,

in the world’s tragedies soaring

up into those clouds’ indifference,

up into their accidental sense of time :

start there.

Or rather dive like the hawk.

The task you must perform starts there.

Though the sun may be veiled

on cloudy days,

your task starts there.

Dear young poet! Here I am beneath your feet.

All the poets of bygone days and I

are the ground you trample.

Now write your poems.

Not yesterday’s poems.

Not tomorrow’s poems.

Write your poems now.

Note : Soma is the name given to an intoxicating drink mentioned in the Indian Vedas.

A Dead Banner

The wind drops, the banner dies.

Who dares call that

death?

What folly. What folly.

When the sun has set,

who dares say that such darkness

is death?

Once old soldiers have hobbled away,

the voices of newly arrived troops are soon recognized

by the enemy behind the hills.

Who dares call that death

death?

What folly.

The wind blows.

The banner comes back to life.

So go forth, embrace the wind.

Now you will grow strong,

as your world comes alive.

Lash the air with a stroke of your banners,

then go forth.

The wind is blowing.

All you banners, flap and rend. . .

One Apple

For one month, two months, even three or four,

a man painted one apple.

And he kept on painting

while the apple

rotted,

dried up,

until you could no longer tell if it was an apple or what.

In the end, those paintings were no longer

of an apple at all.

Not paintings of apples,

in the end, those paintings were of shriveled things,

good-for-nothing things,

that’s all they were.

But the painter

gained strength, letting him know the world in which he lived.

He gained strength, letting him realize there were details

he could never paint.

He tossed his brush aside.

Darkness arrived,

ruthlessly trampling his paintings.

He took up his brush again,

to paint the darkness.

The apple was no more,

but starting from there

emerged paintings of all that is not apple.

Evening of Memorial Rites

He had no memory

of his father, who’d died when he was two.

As he grew up, it seemed

he’d been given his father’s likeness.

Once his voice broke, it seemed

he’d been given his father’s voice.

At the height of the harvest

he showed no signs of laziness,

as if he’d been given his father’s diligence, too.

On the evening of his father’s memorial rites

his lamp under the eaves shines very far.

A Bell at Dawn

It must be dawn.

Have I heard a bell

heralding dawn?

I am suddenly awake.

What is that bell

saying to me?

Is it telling me to join my hands in prayer?

Is it telling me to repent

for the past twenty years,

the past thirty years?

No, that’s not it.

That bell is sounding a warning

to an age that kicks at solemn truths

as if they’re mere tattered fences of straw,

while it seriously, recklessly, fills its heart,

that has never known bitterness,

with utter greed and corruption.

The bell sounds a warning to an age

that throws into the trash-can the thoughts

that stand firm against the deepest night

and all such things.

Holding back anger,

it’s sounding a warning.

A new age of barbarity is approaching,

an age when humans won’t know how to be human,

an age of monsters,

an ultra-modern age,

an age of technology;

that’s what’s coming.

The bell is warning

that today nothing has value,

that an age is coming

when all such things as

peace, love, and justice

will become mere toys,

much more than ever before.

Nowadays we can no longer see anything

as majestic as mountain ranges,

anything as unbounded

as the Indian ocean.

An age is coming devoid of storms,

with the towering waves of times gone by --

the bell is warning of that.

Poets, you are our only hope.

Arise again,

transcend this age of death and destruction,

arise and lead us to an age of humanity,

ablaze with light,

an age of life.

Hear the bell warning of all these things.

Road

There is no road!

From here on is hope.

I’m breathless:

from here on is hope.

If there is no road,

I make the road as I go.

From here on is history.

History is not the past;

it includes everything

from the future

and the dangers it brings,

through all my present life,

to the unknown after

and the darkness after.

Darkness

is mere absence of light.

From here on is hope.

There is no road.

Therefore

I make the road as I go.

There is a road.

There’s a road, and along it

a host of tomorrows are coming, flawless.

A Boat

You set

on the horizon of my mind

and for evermore

a boat is setting out between you and me.

A boat sets out

never to return,

never return,

never.

A Short Biography

Now and again, I dream.

After a pelican has flown far across the Indian Ocean,

I dream.

Like my father used to dream, back home

in the darkness when the light had vanished after sunset,

I dream.

Awakened from dreams,

I’m alive like a power line buzzing in the wind.

So far, I’ve always rejected dreams.

Even in my dreams

I’ve struggled to reject dreams.

Rather

I’ve rejected

every kind of fantasy,

any conjecture dominating an age.

Things as they are,

that’s all there is.

Then I saw

a gleaming, the ocean at night

luminescent.

I saw

the waves’ white teeth

faintly glinting

as they were buried in darkness.

Things as they are,

that’s all there is.

Yet I saw

the glow glimmer then vanish,

a phosphorescence, with the oneness

of a new‑born child with its mother.

Now I approve of dreams.

Things as they are, that’s not all there is.

I dream.

Yesterday

is not today;

today

is not tomorrow.

But I dream of tomorrow.

This earth is the tomb of experience.

That Flock of Black Cranes

In Japan, near Kagoshima, in southern Kyushu,

a flock of black cranes is flying

straight to Siberia,

to the shores of the Amur River.

I wonder where they get their strength?

Once spring comes, cruising at sixty

or, full-speed, at eighty miles-an-hour,

crossing the sea,

the mainland,

flying straight, that flock of black cranes :

I wonder where they get their strength?

They’re all one family,

interrelated,

one hundred,

perhaps one hundred and fifty,

flying in formation,

on a diet of sardines.

Once they’re fully rested,

one bird loudly flaps its wings,

then rises, and all rise together.

In Fall they fly southward, as far as Korea,

in springtime northward

towards the Amur River.

They live free of attachments.

Some die,

others are born.

Flying straight for several thousand miles,

that flock of black cranes :

I wonder where they get their strength?

My Daughter

As yet, my little daughter Ch’aryong

doesn’t know the word “division.”

She doesn’t know the phrase “demilitarized zone.”

Admirable generation, my daughter’s. True patriots!

Note : The demilitarized zone (DMZ) roughly follows the 38th Parallel, dividing North and South Korea. It was fixed at the armistice of 1953. Before the Korean War, Korea had been a single country for well over a thousand years. Therefore, the little girl whose vocabulary does not include such words is a model of true Korean patriotism.

The Waning Moons of Old

I’m the king. When I grow thin

the world grows fat;

when I grow fat

the world grows lean.

We used to always look up

at the waning moon.

Note : this poem refers to the poet’s childhood experience of hunger.

Our Country’s Wandering Minstrel

I am pregnant with a wandering minstrel.

Just feel my swollen belly.

Can’t you feel the little vagabond playing?

Very soon now,

the brat will emerge.

Once our land is whole again,

the brat will emerge,

roam far and wide,

and make everyone weep with his poems and songs.

Just feel my swollen stomach.

Can’t you hear it singing inside my womb?

Once the brat is out

and roaming the country,

I’ll stop writing poems.

All my efforts have never made one dry leaf stir

but beyond such regrets

anticipation shines :

I can hear the songs that brat will sing as he roams,

and the sound of the poems he will recite,

sometimes bright and clear,

sometimes with a husky voice.

Tomorrow is today, today!

Grave Memories

In my youth I was quite fascinated by graves, be they

the six hundred and eighty in Hwangtung Public Cemetery,

or those of the Sarapong Cemetery on Cheju Island.

I used to pass out there on my way home at night.

I made quite a habit of sleeping beside tombs.

Word spread.

Folks started calling me the Sarapong Ghost.

After someone died, the appearance of a new grave

would be such a good day.

“You’ve come at last!

Welcome, friend!

You’re nowhere as well off as here,” I’d say;

it was such a good day.

When night fell,

I’d drink and drink

until I was utterly drunk.

as I passed the new tomb, I’d pass out and snooze.

Once, at dawn a centipede bit me.

For a whole week, one side of my face

was swollen and aching,

the size of a pumpkin.

As a novice monk

on my way to nearby Mirae Temple in Tongyong

I spent half a day in a cemetery.

I’d completely forgotten the errand I was on.

Later, the head monk would give me hell.

Since then, decades have floated by .

Now I’ve finally realized:

animals don’t make graves.

Thus animals are better than people,

since they leave no tomb behind.

Thus animals are better than God.

Animals are a hundred times better than me.

Is that why I used to be so fond of graves?

Was it so I could realize that one thing?

Is that why I used to cry and cry?

Resting

The era when you galloped on horseback

is past, but not gone. Another era

for galloping on horseback is here.

Take it easy. Earn each day

what you need for that day. Azaleas

still blossom all round you. Sighing

is not sorrow. When you stop to sigh,

kites in the sky also take a rest.

True rest is the mind’s highest state.

The Road Not Yet Traveled (1993)

Windy Day

A windy day such as I have long loved.

“Windy!”

four-year-old Ch’aryong exclaims,

and a brindled milking cow gives echo

to her voice :

“Mooo.”

Windy day.

Look, the grass.

Look, the trees.

Look how the animals can’t stay still.

Thus the world comes to be,

thanks to the stillness of a rusty tractor.

Snake

Snake who cross my path so late at night!

Surely I’m as pleased to meet you

as you are pleased to be meeting me.

On this earth we are two of a kind.

After you, please.

I’ll go my way once you have crossed.

I’ll go on toward love-making,

giving birth to wisdom, until day breaks.

Chestnuts

The spines of a chestnut burr all stand erect

while the nut inside is ripening.

Pop!

Autumn has come.

When the ripe chestnuts split,

what pious caution :

no visits now from dragonflies.

The heavens alone look down.

Abruptly, a cloud veils

the sky,

and that cloud looks down.

Nothing in this world can really be named.

Names are so rashly spoken.

Day

Nightfall is so fortunate.

Recalling all the departed,

every day ends in nightfall :

so fortunate..

Isn’t each trivial parting really salvation?

Evening darkness already hangs thick.

The departed

have already come,

and soon God will come,

with silent steps.

How beautiful God is :

no form, no sound.

Clay

Winter’s coldest days have come

and gone. Spring is already near.

The last traces of snow

lie wretched in the ditches.

If you are human, human

or animal, surely you’re a child of clay.

Listen hard. Hear

the drumbeats in the clay?

At least once a month, you should lie

on the ground and listen well.

Hear your grandfather ringing like a bell

inside the clay?

Death Poem

A few days ago, a monk came down

from Muju Hermitage in Sobaek Mountain.

As we talked of this and that

he began to cry.

I didn’t ask why.

But that must have seemed like a question, too,

for without asking, I got a reply.

His teacher lay dying.

As his disciple,

it was his duty to ask

that he bequeath a death poem,

but he had no time

before his master closed his eyes.

Because he hadn’t asked,

his master left no poem, so he was sad.

On the spot I improvised two lines of verse :

The monk’s temple eats rice

so our house sleeps well-fed.

That’s all too true.

In the yard outside, the dog’s asleep.

The wind woke it briefly, but now it’s asleep again.

Note : Sobaek Mountain lies near the east coast, due east from Seoul. The verse at the end suggests the common complaint that Korean monks are altogether too rich. It is a tradition in Buddhist culture to sum up one’s life, art, and spiritual practice in a short poem while facing death, called a death poem.

Beside a Compost Heap

One day, this age will surely end.

skin peels off the backs of people

making their way back home

under the scorching sun

with grass piled high on the tractors.

Tomorrow the old compost heap

must be spread on the field.

Sons and daughters

working in Seoul

in hotels or restaurants

step lightly, their rural features gone.

Out Walking At Last

How long has it been?

I say hello to the magpie flying up from a treetop.

Out walking at last.

My shoes are excited.

The person walking in front of me

has shoes even more excited.

That person in front looks good from behind.

Who can it be?

who can it be?

I’d better not overtake.

Today I’m truly human behind someone else.

An Empty Field

Don’t ask why.

Why?

Don’t ask.

Sometimes it’s silly to ask.

The sky asks no questions.

Yet what’s blue is still blue.

The blazing cold is past,

everything’s white, and smelling of milk.

With everything

becoming one like this,

all one world,

and the ground thawing out,

no questions hang in the haze.

Two or three old women are back

out in the fields.

What should they ask? What reply?

Dandelions are out already

celandines, too --

the cowslips are out

with bindweed, tumbleweed,

lady smock, as well,

buttercups are out,

bluebells, too.

Early spring

sunset.

Spring

All living things are blossoming, are blossoming,

so you stay there, my dearest love.

I’m off to Siberia.

Shit

Under that bush,

a dog took a shit.

Lifting a quivery tail,

it took a shit.

Over here,

I took a shit – and feel happy.

I’m happy

happy.

Then I think:

it wasn’t me.

It wasn’t me, it was the dog

who took a shit.

Now I feel happy – and sad.

Above a Village

Well before reaching Hyongje Peak,

among pines still moderate in size

after perhaps a century’s growth,

well before reaching Hyongje Peak,

just after I passed behind Unsu Hermitage,

I sent the dog back home.

The dog went home alone,

I remained alone.

What have I ever done

to put an end to someone’s tears?

Unable to put an end to my own,

I sat there behind Unsu Hermitage

and shed some more.

Perhaps it was because in this world

there are children’s hearts so innocent they do not realize

that what comes after sunset is darkness.

Perhaps it was because in this world there is the joy

of dogs that silently wag their tails

in the dark.

I should linger here, become

one with myself, and ten thousand dogs.

A dog barks in the village below.

The lights respond to the sound

and shine that much brighter.

An Old Woman Speaks

I moved from Sungtu-ri when I wed

and have lived here all my married life,

fifty years.

Working in the fields,

cleaning the pigsty,

rattling dishes in the kitchen,

no matter what the job,

I enjoyed them all.

I enjoyed them,

yes, enjoyed them all.

My body,

there was nothing it didn’t like doing.

My mother was just the same way.

Mother was small,

she nearly got wed to the village dwarf --

then she met a man like a totem pole

and I was born.

Nine others followed me,

six died, three survived.

The four of us

are scattered now in different places,

in Ch’onan,

P’yontaek,

Kongdo,

we’ve all grown old and toothless.

Well, now, just look : a kite

caught in the branches of that jujube tree.

That’s my pastime, now.

Dawn

What’s happening?.

All the forest was wide awake

in the darkness.

I emerged, driven out from the forest

although there was no one there.

You see? When we know almost nothing

about anything,

surely that ignorance makes

a very good neighbor

to the best wisdom.

I emerged from the forest, driven out.

Can there be any identity in ignorance?

A cock crowed

and vigorously the eastern sky grew bright.

I suddenly came to a village.

It felt unfamiliar.

Kids were sound asleep with their dreams

and birds had flown down to empty yards.

Mustn’t it be immensely painful

for the sun to come soaring up in the east?

Who are you? Who are you?

New morning sunlight, deep in ignorance :

you shine so very darkly!

A Cuckoo

Is this how it is?

A cuckoo calls.

Dark new dawn.

A cuckoo calls.

Finally, it rains.

Is this how it is?

A rainy day

and all day long

a cuckoo calls.

A cuckoo calls.

Is this how the cosmos expands?

A cuckoo calls, “Cuckoo!”

Afternoon

Each leaf of every tree

casts its own shadow.

Below,

each leaf of every weed

casts its own appropriate shadow.

How could the hills not follow suit?

In every valley, every valley,

at midday

no shadow appears anywhere.

The sun declines

and then

every valley, without exception,

casts its own shadow.

At that moment

everything that exists

reveals its own best self.

Born as a man,

how can I be myself or anybody else

without such shadows

in some valley of my heart,

without an ageless shadow?

In a Street

Have you ever

been another person?

Have you ever been

another person? Today

I have nothing but questions.

If you say you’ve never been someone else

since the day you were born, how will

a breath of the wind of this world

ever dare touch your hair?

Entering a Wood

The wood was dark.

The child accompanying me

clasped my hand tightly.

The child and I were one ‑‑

no need for words.

We advanced farther.

Suddenly, I saw it :

my childhood, whole and intact.

A baby elk went racing off.

Drawing Maps

I was drawing maps again today.

I drew the North Sea between England and Norway

and the shores of the Gulf of Pohai in the East,

then I tore up all my maps. This was

not it, I felt. This

really wasn’t it. Just then

the wind spoke, knocking at my window. “Poor

little guy. You should draw a new world,

not the contemporary everyday.” Not only

wind, but wind and rain spoke

together, knocking at my window. Trying to ignore

my growling stomach, I began

drawing maps again.

Not like before,

but tomorrow’s maps,

with no America . . . or Asia . . .

A Certain Happiness

What I am thinking now

has already been thought

by someone else,

somewhere in this world.

Don’t cry.

What I am thinking now

is being thought

by someone else,

somewhere in this world.

Don’t cry.

What I am thinking now

is about to be thought

by someone else,

somewhere in this world.

Don’t cry.

What a happy thing, for sure.

In this world,

somewhere in this world,

I have come into being

thanks to many selves.

A happy thing, for sure.

I come into being

by many other selves.

Don’t cry.

The Road Not Yet Traveled

Never say you’ve reached your destination.

Though you’ve covered thousands of miles,

a still longer road remains ahead.

While you sleep through the night

like an animal once the sun has set,

a still longer road remains ahead.

Your constant companion, loneliness,

is no mere loneliness: it’s none other

than the world,

and the road ahead,

a world unknown to anyone.

A wind is rising.

Tokdo (1995)

Mountain

I was a mountain,

born on a mountainside,

in the days when mountains and men were one:

I was a mountain

and a laughing child, too.

I went up into the mountains,

bathed my young heart

in mountain showers;

fresh winter mistletoe glistening.

I was the mountain too.

In the darkness

just before dawn

and in the obscurity of nightfall

the mountain showed me

all I longed for very clearly,

even what lay far away.

Then I left the mountain,

off to hear the waves ‑‑ what sea was that?

After wandering, here and there,

I suddenly looked up:

there was the mountain!

The mountain spoke. Its fine green gaze

said : Come when you wish.

Mountain of my origin

that I ever return to.

I am a mountain again.

Sorrow

In my native village, two baby fawns died,

pierced in the same moment by hunters’ arrows.

Their mother came galloping up,

circled the spot as if out of her mind,

then fell down dead.

No arrow touched her,

yet she fell down dead.

When that mother deer was cut open,

they found her twenty‑yard‑long gut

ripped apart

by the sorrow of losing her fawns.

In this world, everything that exists

must experience sorrow, it’s true,

but can hers be called mere sorrow?

Real sorrow has ever been gut‑wrenching

Tonight, I’ll bury my snack of sorrow

quietly in a hole in the ground.

Who knows? Next year, or the year after,

fragrant mugwort might come sprouting

from what I’d buried there, so what

would the death of the mother deer release?

We must give birth, begin a new world

with imperishable sorrow. And soon

the crimson sun of dawning day hastens away.

Note: This incident is located in Ko Un’s native village, and must be thought of as having happened in his childhood, or even before he was born. At that time hunters did not have guns.

Wind

The wind is blowing as if it had no choice.

Woods come alive.

Meadows come alive.

Between their poles,

power lines come screaming to life.

The far-off sea comes alive with rising crests.

A wind is blowing.

In the sky, the stars are invisible.

A wind is blowing.

Upon the ground,

one street comes alive.

The orphanage in that street comes alive.

A wind is blowing.

Already dying, my flesh comes alive.

A wind is blowing.

The world comes alive as flags of many nations.

Wind!

Flags!

Where Are My New Books?

My ten thousand books!

I’m throwing you all out

without so much as a drink together.

The street’s full of litter so you won’t feel lonely.

I’m throwing you out.

All my ten thousand books!

No!

No! you protested

but between you and me

conflict has been replaced by a stupid peace

so I’m throwing you out.

Now, with the patience of a dumb, daytime moon

I’m on my way

in search of new books,

different from you old ones.

I’m on my way.

I’ve already thrown you out several times.

Somewhere,

somewhere

in search of a hell of new wisdom,

I’m on my way.

Myriad Stars

Marvelous, mad night,

each star shines brilliantly.

Spurred on by deaf‑mute darkness,

every pebble in the world is poised

to leap into the sky

and strike the stars down!

Back to Port

When a boat arrives,

gulls

are first

to come out in greeting.

How could a harbor

be only for leaving?

Before the gulls,

other eyes

are out, searching,

to welcome it too --

the eyes of sailors’ wife’s

embrace the sea

a thousand leagues around.

How could a harbor

be only for leaving?

Rock

Not one rock of So-un Mountain

is really rock. I break one

and am dazzled and dazed

by the sight of time -- born

and dying through millennial

desires and finally come to this --

bejeweling every kind of sound.

Song for a Baby

If the world had no babies,

it would be no world at all.

A one‑year‑old babe goes tottering

then thuds down on its bottom.

This one day is really the whole world.

If the world had no babies,

it would be no world at all.

The baby cries in the night.

This one night is really the whole world.

If the world had no babies,

it would be no world at all.

Growing quickly,

the baby points off into the distance.

In that point is really the whole world.

Looking up at a Night Sky

Is something new destined to be born in the night sky?

Why are the honorable stars so thickly strewn up there?

From Persia,

Mesopotamia,

Ethiopia ‑‑

are venerable Magi heading off there, staffs in hand?

Following suit, I simply cannot sleep.

A Waterfall

Standing before a waterfall,

I forgot the noise of the waterfall. Wow!

In the noise of the waterfall

I forgot the waterfall.

Wow! When have I ever been

so intensely alone?

Standing before a waterfall today

I was more alone than for decades. Wow!

Wild Geese

Wild geese are flying off by night.

here below,

here below

lights go out one by one.

In that dark womb

between you and me

babies yet unborn are dreaming.

Tokdo

It was never home to anyone,

not even one newborn babe.

Out in the middle of the East Sea,

even the hoarse cries of ancient gulls

get buried in the roar of waves.

It was never home to anyone.

Unknown to any

but the open sea,

emerging there, of all places,

for ages a silent, rocky mound,

it was never home to anyone.

Then someone set off for a distant place

and could not return.

To him it was more than home,

more than a roar of waves,

as it rose embraced by warm sunset rays

after his unavoidable defeat.

No one reached there in primitive times.

For centuries of windy time

it stood alone, buried in the waves’ roar,

a place where no one was ever born.

Yet ultimately, it was everyone’s home

while they wandered freely far away.

Oh, Tokdo in the East Sea.

Note: Tokdo is a rocky outcrop rising from the sea between Korea and Japan. It is too small and rough to support a farming population. In the early 1990s, Koreans were outraged to learn that Japan considered it to be Japanese territory while Korea has always considered it to be part of Korea. A campaign was launched, Ko Un and many other writers visited it, and the Korean military presence was reinforced. “Tokdo is our land” became a popular slogan, even a pop-song.

A Reverie

Were someone to assert

a perfectly obvious fact

is merely fable, or surely fantasy,

and were not just a few

but several million to unanimously consent,

then the fact becomes more: it’s violence.

Even a perfectly obvious fact

seems to be a naughty spirit

prancing about in a midday reverie.

A flower is floating in mid-air.

Fire! Shoot that flower down!

15 April 1992

I stayed home all day.

Friends came.

Friends went.

Afterwards

there was a storm.

In Lhassa, Tibet, a blind lama died.

16 April 1992

I stayed home all day.

No one came by.

The body of the Tibetan lama was moved to a hill.

A few dozen eagles gathered,

from among all the starving eagles of India, of Asia.

They began to peck at the sacred corpse.

17 April 1992

I stayed home all day, again.

I read an encyclopedia.

All I had read I forgot at once.

Only the Tibetan lama’s bare bones were left.

Empty nirvana, indeed!

18 April 1992

I stayed home all day, again.

Lo and behold,

the dead lama had left a son, born in secret.

In deepest night he collected the lama’s remains.

After sunrise, he made two necklaces with the bones.

One he kept.

The other he decided to sell to American poet

Allen Ginsberg.

So now nirvana links Lhassa and New York!

In the House of Prabhutaratna

In the notes to the Lotus Sutra it is reported that

Shakyamuni Buddha, after spending eighty years

traveling bare-footed in the Ganges Valley,

left the earth,

went up to heaven,

and visited Prabhutaratna Buddha

in his abode.

The two of them set up house together.

Prabhutaratna’s face grew brighter than before

while the face of his guest Sakyamuni

also shone exceedingly bright.

The two got on well together.

Then a bodhisattva declared

Prabhutaratna was the Sakyamuni of the past

while Sakyamuni was the Prabhutaratna of this present age,

so the two were really one.

The news spread throughout the heavens

and over the earth.

All the manifestations of Shakyamuni Buddha,

scattered in various realms,

rose to their place in heaven

and became one Buddha.

The house of Prabhutaratna Buddha,

all this time ringing with talk,

grew very quiet.

Being one Buddha can be very boring, it seems.

So he went around sleeping with various stars,

one tonight, another tomorrow,

another the day after.

A penniless child down on earth

gazed up every night

as one star went roaming around the sky.

Note : Shakyamuni (“Sage from the Shakya clan”) is an epithet applied to Siddharta Gautama, who is usually known as “the Buddha” or “the historical Buddha”. According to some schools of Buddhism, there have been many other Buddhas (beings who have attained ultimate enlightenment, also known as “nirvana”) in remote ages past, and another will come in the future. One such “Ancient Buddha” is known as Prabhutaratna (“Many jewels”). While some schools teach that one who has attained nirvana ceases entirely to exist after physical death, the Buddhist scripture known as the Lotus Sutra teaches that nirvana is not annihilation. As a sign of this, it tells that when Shakyamuni Buddha was preaching its contents, Prabhutaratna appeared in his abode to hear him. Shakyamuni Buddha died when he was eighty and this poem struggles with the question of the unity and plurality of Buddha nature. A “bodhisattva” is a being who is on the way to becoming a Buddha.

East Sea Lotus Flowers

A mighty babe

threw a stone

at the sky

over the hills.

Over the hills

for decades it flew,

then that stone

showered down

an avalanche

into the East Sea

just in front of Naksan Temple.

Falling there,

they bloomed

like so many lotus flowers,

dazzlingly bright,

floated there,

dazzlingly bright.

Note: The East Sea lies between Korea and Japan. Naksan Temple rises on the edge of the sea south of the city of Sokch’o. The sea in front of it is studded with rocks. Lotus flowers are the sacred blossoms of Buddhism.

Time

Once, long ago,

on his deathbed, the Buddha said :

“In days to come, when I am no more,

I beg you, make no images of me.”

After that one request

people lost their Master,

so they had no choice

but to simply revere the Buddha

in their hearts.

Everywhere,

no matter where, they revered him thus.

But that, it seemed, was not enough.

Since he’d become enlightened at dawn

at Bodhgaya under a bodhi tree,

people began to venerate the leaves of that tree,

offering service to them,

bowing down before them,

joining palms in worship of them.

Until one day the Greek-style artists of Gandhara

carved their sensuous statues of seated Buddha,

to which people offered service,

before which they bowed down,

in worship whereof they joined palms.

Note : In the early centuries, Buddhists made no images of the Buddha. Gandhara is the region stretching from North-west India up into Afghanistan in which many Greek craftsmen settled, having followed Alexander the Great on his conquest, and transmitted their Hellenistic culture to their descendents. When Ashoka (270 - 236 B.C.E.) established Buddhism as the official religion of his great Indian kingdom, he asked these artists to make representations of the Buddha in bodily form and the result was the origin of Buddhist sculpture. These first statues are often sensuously beautiful.

Mountain Birds

A New Year’s Song for 1994

This new year, after a long winter,

may the newly budding blossoms be beautiful.

May lovely flowers bloom

more than any other year.

May they yield abundant seeds and fruit.

This new year, after the first leaves sprout

a few days early, one by one,

may a new world of early summer green emerge.

May that world of green toss its head in youthful glee.

This new year, may the rabbits bear young,

may the mountain birds in the hills

and the crows in the villages flap powerful wings.

As they soar aloft from branches and trees,

may the shaking treetops awaken the sleepy sky.

This new year, may all that has gone wrong

between each of us

be put right, be put fully right.

May we all become neighbors whispering sweetly together.

When fall comes, may brightly hued leaves provoke tears.

Then may hatred cease throughout the world.

May no one rob or harm another.

Above all, here in Korea :

how much longer must South and North stay apart?

This new year, may snow fall in large flakes

and make the two one.

Burying Names

A New Year’s Song for 1994

Soon the sun will rise.

I am making myself a name.

Casting away all my previous names,

the bones of decades past,

I am making a new name.

Soon the sun will rise.

Once it has risen, the sky

will still be bright with stars,

invisible to my eyes.

Then I will stop making names.

I will leave names behind.

I will leave names behind and set off,

far away from newly made names.

Truth must appear.

Has truth ever appeared to me before?

In the streets of so many names,

in the gutters of so many names,

truth was only a name.

Has it ever really appeared to me?

Soon the sun will rise.

I have lived with all those names

in order to leave names behind.

Ay, that frozen, scorching hell of names.

Once I set off, something will be achieved.

What will it be, if not a tomb for all those names?

Soon the sun will rise. Once it has risen,

the stars will bury themselves in that tomb.

A Memorial Stone (1997)

My Poems

In the desolation of the 1950s, those Zero Years,

I wandered aimlessly,

until some full stops left lying about after the war

proved my unexpected salvation.

The holiness of the black dot at the end of a phrase

gave added luster to the words that followed.

So I eagerly included frequent full stops in my poems.

Once into the 1970s,

my poems, like water

seething at the river’s brink,

hesitating before a long journey,

plunged in utter confusion

into the river

and went floating away.

In the course of time

full stops disappeared from my poems

My previous salvation, like a worn-out shoe,

had lost its effectiveness

Poems without periods

do not end with each individual poem

but follow on, one after another,

chiseling out light hidden in the darkness,

showing me the world and what lay beyond it

Even before my poems existed,

the ongoing motion of the world

did not permit so much as a single period

In consequence

my period-less poems

were certain to be ongoing motion.

I realized the certainty of transmigration,

apart from which

all perception was illusion

Every day my poems

flocked together and went flying up,

flocked together and settled again,

dreaming of days when they would be

another poet’s poems

Oh, is the azure glow of early dawn

the full range of a quite breathless moment?

But this present day flows away

with the inexhaustible stream of days gone by

and my poems will have no full periods

tomorrow or the day after tomorrow

Sumano Pagoda

On Kallei Mountain near Chongson, in Kangwon Province,

high in hills thick with ancient oaks,

Chongam Temple’s Sumano Pagoda

has stood for centuries.

One man,

eager to show his mother

the pagoda’s reflection,

dug a pond below it, filled with water.

Truly,

that was no easy task

even if Sumano Pagoda’s quite unique.

That man had almost no worldly desires

and nothing to call his own. Suddenly,

beside the pagoda, he saw

a golden pagoda,

a silver pagoda,

standing there in the twilight.

A miracle.

Perhaps feeling unequal to the vision on his own,

the fellow called out

to the people below :

“Come up!

Come up here!”

pointing, speechless, at the gold and silver pagodas.

The two pagodas that had been clearly visible

vanished as abruptly as they had come.

It was quite absurd.

After the people had gone back down, grumbling,

just as night was beginning to deepen,

the gold pagoda and the silver pagoda

appeared there again, standing tall,

laughing gaily in the light of the new moon.

-- Look!

Note: Chongam Temple is in the mountainous region not far from the East Sea due east of Seoul. The pagoda’s name means “Water-agate” and it was built of brick-sized blocks of a stone similar to agate some 1200 years ago. It has always been celebrated for its particular beauty.

Poet

He was a poet for many years.

Women and children

all called him a poet.

He was certainly more of a poet

than anyone else.

The pigs and boars,

grunting, also called him a poet.

On his way home from a long journey, he died.

Not one poem survived in his hut.

Poet that he was, had he never written a poem?

Then a poet wrote

one of his poems for him.

No sooner written,

that poem flew off on the wings of the wind.

At which, a host of poems

written over the centuries, in East and West, past and present,

one after another, all went flapping up

and

away.

Poems of Struggle

All these years, in windy Seoul, in Kwangju,

in Pusan,

on the edge of the DMZ

with this single body of mine,

I have constantly improvised poems of struggle.

Sometimes,

I longed to be one with the ocean waves in a night storm,

with the thunderbolts falling on history’s blood-stained events.

Sometimes,

I would stand with friends in streets of tears,

and be incapable of a single teardrop.

Time is not something that simply passes.

I wonder what became of all the tomorrows

contained in the poems I sang?

True, there are chicks that have already hatched

after brooding on bright dreams, but

what went flapping up today

was nothing more than a few hundred

tame pigeons.

I really do not know when empty squares

were such sacred places.

Yet if I listen I can hear:

the drum beats of a new season coming

boom... boom... boom

I hear drum beats full of deep meaning

in the new season’s poems of struggle.

In struggle, yesterday is today,

today reaches out to tomorrow.

At the sound of those drum beats I leap to my feet again

and gaze ahead.

In a corner of this country’s destruction and creation,

the struggle I must be part of for a long while yet,

while snowflakes fly,

boom... boom... boom

I hear drum beats booming out

as the moment comes.

Home

Home is far away.

The womb that contained you,

the village where you were born,

the neighboring village where you used to play :

none of those places is home.

If you go back to the time before you were human,

that is home.

No, not even that. Home is even farther away.

Cry out once, without any yearning,

with the artless voice of animals.

That sacred place is home

where people become animals again.

Living as humans is no longer possible.

The animals we’ve despised for centuries past,

already free of greed and folly,

are standing up,

their naked bodies haloed with golden dusk.

Then nowhere in this world is home.

The Little Countries

The modern Olympics were a hundred years old.

All 197 member nations were present

at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games.

Before the opening ceremony each country’s athletes

came marching in behind their national flag :

the Greek flag

the Norwegian flag

the American flag

the German flag

the French flag

the Russian flag

the British flag

the Australian flag

the Japanese flag

the Chinese flag

the Canadian flag, all were familiar.

Then the Korean athletes came in behind their flag,

each with a fan bearing the national symbol of yin and yang.

American television made a break at that point, it seems,

blotting out the Korean team’s entrance

with a Coca-Cola commercial.

To me, the flags of most of the attending states,

seen for the first time,

were very unfamiliar.

I felt sorry, very sorry

for those flags.

We only remembered the American flag,

the French flag,

or the Japanese flag.

There seemed no need to know the small countries

with their flags.

That just isn’t right.

Haute Volta

Togo

Zaire with its torch

Burundi

Botswana

Mali :

our Korean flag should fly side-by-side

with those countries’ flags.

At the time of the Kwangju Massacre in May 1980,

remember how the little nation of the Seychelles,

which we had never so much as heard of, declared

that Korea should not be considered a country at all.

Why, our flag should fly with that country’s flag.

Leaving aside the big countries,

we should talk with new love

to the little countries of the world.

We should sing through painful nights with them.

After the Atlanta Olympics we realized that

to ignore and despise little countries, backward countries,

is another way of kowtowing to the big countries.

Note : In May 1980, heavily armed soldiers were sent into the south-western city of Kwangju where students were peacefully demonstrating in favor of democracy. Hundreds of students and citizens were killed in the ensuing violent repression, which allowed General Chun Doo-Hwan to take power. Ko Un, Kim Dae-Jung and hundreds more were arrested at the same moment. In this poem, Ko Un is contrasting the tacit support given to the Korean military by the United States and other major powers with the disgust and condemnation expressed by the tiny island republic of the Seychelles.

Wandering Teacher

A wandering teacher, eighty years old or more,

had spent forty-nine years crossing rivers here and there,

tramping bare-foot down dusty roads,

talking nonsense everywhere he went.

Finally reaching the day he was to quit the world,

he insisted, completely straight-faced,

that he’d never said anything at all.

That was about two thousand five hundred years ago.

But there was a deaf man who couldn’t hear his last words,

and all the while a hawk floated in the sky, motionless,

ignoring the scorching heat,

and gazed down with spirited eyes at the aged corpse.

The Sound of a Flute

Long ago on a Northeast Asian mountain,

a thick length of bamboo lay abandoned.

Had it been flung away and fallen here?

Had some passerby become distracted

and left it behind as he went on?

There was no reason why anyone should know.

Decades went by.

Rains came. Snow fell thick.

Yet each spring

the bamboo was still fresh, no sign of rotting.

It was very strange.

By night, it absorbed the moonlight.

By day, it absorbed the trailing white clouds.

With time, a few holes appeared, from which

it gradually began to emit sounds.

At first, the sounds were barely audible.

Ah! Those sounds

were a profound imitation of the sounds of heaven

and the myriad sounds of earth,

as it had long heard them.

They sounded a bit hoarse

as if it had felt sorrow, then let it go.

Or perhaps instead

its sounds seemed unsure of what was a beginning

and what was an end.

One day,

a youth coming down the mountain

approached the sounds.

He was deaf, yet gradually

they penetrated his ears.

Then he understood

everything in the past millennium

and the millennium yet to come.

He very carefully grasped

the sound-emitting bamboo

and bore it back to his home in the caves.

As soon as he got there

he pierced a few more holes.

Then he fell asleep for days and nights.

While he slept

he dreamed of a new, profound sound.

One week later, he awoke.

The late moon was slowly rising.

The boy set the bamboo to his lips

and for the first time it emitted a human sound.

But Heaven’s dazzling breath

was borne on his breath. Besides, the earth’s

deep breath was borne with it too.

Ultimately, that profound sound

echoed through the valley below

then beyond to the next.

Sleeping animals could hear it,

and not only they.

All the mountain’s trees and blades of grass,

the ghosts,

and all the people clustered below --

their sleeping ears opened by themselves

and the sound passed to and fro among those ears.

Time passed.

All the souls gathered here today

are hearing that sound too.

That sound is

this sound.

To hear this sound, mere listening is not enough.

You must look at the sound,

gently opening your eyes.

Returning from Abroad

In the year 627, the young Chinese monk Xuan Zang

set out down a road the state forbade people to take.

Even if it had not been thus forbidden,

nine times out of nine

it was a deadly road.

Yet still he set out.

Seventeen years later, he came back.

The road he returned by

was a deadly road too,

yet he came back alive.

He had a huge frame strapped to his back

and at the top of that frame

he had perched a parasol

of waxed paper and bamboo strips.

And at the very top of that parasol

dangling,

hanging down,

a very tiny incense‑burner was fixed.

He came home with incense burning in it.

His right hand was holding a whisk to drive away insects,

his left hand clutched a rolled‑up sutra.

Like this, he came home.

How could anyone tell all he’d been through?

Burning incense in that incense‑burner

hanging before his diminutive brow,

the great master Xuan Zang

came back from his death‑defying quest for truth.

After running out of incense

on his way across the desert,

he came back burning incense in his heart.

Note : Xuan Zang (602 ‑ 664) became a monk when he was 12. Frustrated by a lack of reliable texts and teachers, he set out across the dreaded Gobi Desert without seeking the imperial permission that law required and reached India. There he spent some 17 years, studying Buddhism, making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the Buddha, and above all collecting relics of the Buddha and sacred texts. He returned to China, after another remarkable journey, and spent the rest of his life overseeing the translation of the texts he had brought back into 1335 volumes. The record he left of his travels is of great historical significance.

Cheju Island

I have to go to Cheju Island.

Not to hibernate like some snake

but just as snakes are reborn after death

as something else,

I have to go to that haunted island

to be born again as something else.

Once there,

filling my heart with the vast empty stage

of the ocean that covers the earth,

how can I be restricted to a single birth?

I shall realize I am all the time being reborn,

over and over again.

Once, I was an eagle, motionless in the lofty sky.

Once, I was a sandpiper, only permitted to fly by night.

I was a whore’s child,

dead soon after birth.

Then, a huge ravening animal.

I was a pine tree, lost

beyond a mountain ridge arched like an animal’s back.

Next time, I may unexpectedly be

a migrating bird on its way to distant lands

with no hope of arriving any time soon,

a migrating bird that asks its ancestors’ ghosts

to join it in its flight.

I have to go to Cheju Island.

It once was home to such a host of gods --

a hundred thousand of them still the source

of the sound of its waves.

It once was home to such a host of shaman women --

old ones like rocks exposed by the tide

and young ones so bewitching

even old men could not resist their charms.

In midnight darkness

camellias drop red petals.

And that’s not all.

There are anemones under the sea,

starfish undying though killed and killed.

Cheju was never really an island.

Beneath the waves it is secretly linked

with so many places sunk in sleep,

united by long ages of twisting and turning

with other continents, peninsulas

and archipelagos

beyond the horizon.

Its countless seagulls,

the aged ones

and the aging ones succeeding them

for thousands of years above the sea,

are a host of shamans.

They rise from the crests of waves at dawn

and dance, brandishing swords.

White droppings fall

at the close of their finest flights,

while baby bream dance too, under the waves.

They dance, shaking their heads,

swinging swords, piercing the water.

Glittering drops like jewels scatter

and in a flash all the waves begin to dance.

I have to go to Cheju Island

where I will set one poem

adrift on the waves

in quest of vows more sublime

than any past revelation.

This is not inherited

like the art of summoning the souls of the dead

to send them to a land of no return

far out in the ocean.

It is an unknown art,

only achieved by empty hands.

The waves are dancing.

Dazzling anyone standing

on the slopes of Cheju’s dawn-lit hills,

the waves dance, almost ablaze.

It’s still too early in Shanghai,

but I fancy a boat whistles in Nagasaki.

The heavens, spread across the sky

above the sea,

awaken the morning here

and the night over there.

Then someone disquietingly appears

and sets a poem adrift on the waves.

Always one noble heart

encounters another,

no need of commands.

A poem goes drifting across the dancing waves.

Placed in a bamboo tube

sealed like wine in a bottle,

it still hears the Cheju winds blowing,

so often reborn,

where lurks

the cry of a new-born infant .

The bamboo drifts, floating horizontal,

sets out after hearing that infant’s cry,

no lovelier sound in all the world,

after hearing the sound of the spirit-filled wind

that blows for weeks with never a lull.

Look, just look!

What could make everything one

as perfectly as a journey across the seas?

Several months later, a familiar bamboo

came back to the shore and the dawn-lit hills.

Is it a ghost? A dream?

It’s back again!

I drew it in like a jumping fish.

Inside was a poem in response to mine,

with all the passion of intense joy.

At last!

The reply to my poem convinces me :

solitude is never solitude.

True solitude

is a form of solidarity.

Set adrift on the endless tide,

once the shore is reached

new freedom comes, waving its hand in greeting.

I wonder:

what will it say?

The wonder changes to smiles

as I open the tube

and find it comes from a poet in Nagasaki.

Quick! This calls for dances, hats with long ribbons twirling,

this exchange between poet

and poet.

A celebration here

and a celebration there.

Cheju is not only Cheju Island.

A poem has come from Nagasaki

and a poem from Cheju’s dawn-lit hills

has set a Nagasaki poet dancing.

I had to go to Cheju Island,

write a poem,

then hurl the bamboo holding my poem

from the edge of some sea-battered, basalt bluff.

The sea received it with open arms.

The bamboo vanished across the sea.

Months later

still nothing returned to where I’d stood.

Then one day as I roamed round the southern shores

at Soguipo, where I’d finally settled down,

I spotted something knocking against a black crag.

It was the bamboo tube,

the bamboo tube.

Inside the tube I’d cast adrift

I found not my poem

but another poem in response.

The one who cast the first poem adrift has left the world.

The shamans of Cheju know full well

that whatever leaves this world

is reborn in a world not unlike the old,

in some respects,

just as the wind rests then rises again.

That poem’s few lines had been written breathlessly :

Love birth as you love women.

Love destruction as you love men.

How precious

is folly at sunset,

sunset remembers nothing.

I had to go to Cheju Island

where people consider

the seas round Cheju

as far as the horizon

and even beyond as all part of their domain.

The sea was paddy-fields, gardens, and streets for them.

The sea was a mystery,

like a code no one could decipher.

It was the explosion of that mystery.

Every point of that domain

has its ancient name :

Block Rock, Ayori Reach, Kayorin Cape

Nunmi End, Fertile Reach, Anvil Crag

Cheeple Head, Broken Oar Head

Daysome Reach, and Yondy Reach

facing Yondy Rock up on Halla Mountain,

to say nothing of gulfweed-covered Nunmok Cape,

Home Meadow, Fern Meadow

that stares open-eyed from far out at sea

at Halla Mountain’s own Fern Meadow,

beyond lies Front Cape,

Fern Back Cape, Kuantal, Outer Kuantal,

Coffin Reach, Heaven Reach,

with South River Reach beyond them,

and unseen Eoh Island --

Eoh Island,

submarine island engulfing life and death.

I have to go to Cheju Island,

Roam those wide-reaching waters,

go rushing on with the tense emptiness

of the panic thieves feel at their first robbery,

drawing on long experience

rather than any fearful reasons,

for now my dreams

are an enlargement of time.

The place where that little bamboo tube

set out and returned

is an enlargement of time,

time that engulfs every desire.

I have to go to that island

for the many more words the world still needs.

With words reborn

as they are killed off,

with Jurassic words already long dead,

I have to go to meet the Cheju Island shamans,

who I realize are being reborn all the time,

have to go to be born again as something else

as my knowing and unknowing play hide-and-seek,

I have go in order to set off like an arrow

soaring toward new worlds away from the despair

revealed in the vast sea-floor

when the whole ocean disappears in a flash.

Note : Cheju Island is a large island lying some distance south-west of the Korean mainland. It constitutes a separate province and has its own distinctive dialect and culture. Korean Shamanism is still particularly strong there, the popular belief that the world is haunted by troublesome spirits and ghosts that can bring trouble to individuals and families so long as they are not put to rest. The shaman is usually a woman who has been initiated to the world of spirits. She has spirit guides that enable her to identify trouble-making ghosts and send them to their proper resting place in the heavens or below the sea. During an exorcism the possessed, spirit-filled shaman dances in frenzy, often wielding brightly shining swords or other implements. As befits a culture that has depended on the surrounding ocean for centuries, every part of the sea has traditional names, an extension of the island’s landscape. Ko Un lived in Cheju Island for several years in the early 1960s, after ceasing to live as a Buddhist monk.

Wild Chrysanthemum

Just think how happy the people

with somewhere to go.

And, again, think how happy

the people with a place to return.

How immensely high the sky,

even if none look up,

coming back with heads hung low.

On a hillside holding generations of my ancestors

something is waving,

a nameless, wild chrysanthemum,

just one flower

yet with that one flower

how happy I am.

Four Wings

There’s a bird with four wings

that flies up from the lake on top of Paektu Mountain.

As you fly like an arrow with that bird,

then fall like an arrow, I want you to look down on the world.

A bird with four wings

flies down to the lake on top of Paektu Mountain

and sips the water in the lake.

That bird’s song

in the bitterest cold,

is utterly flawless.

The wonder of it!

Unknown to all, unknown

like the soul of a babe

born as that bird but dead at birth,

dropping down,

I want you to sing a new song

with that flawless voice

for all the world’s deaf mutes.

Yes, you. . .

Note : Paektu‑san (White‑head Mountain) is a long‑dormant volcano that lies on the frontier between North Korea and China. The lake filling the crater at its summit is the most sacred place in Korea, associated with the foundation myth of Tangun and often considered to be the source of a flow of natural energy (“ki”) that follows chains of lesser mountains the entire length of the Korean peninsula as far as a corresponding volcano, Halla‑san, on Cheju Island in the south.

The Lion

A wind is blowing.

In the Masai grasslands of Tanzania

a wind is blowing.

In the dry grass on a hilltop

an old male lion is crouching.

Indifferent whether the wind blows or not,

he simply gazes off into the distance.

What creature would dare come near?

Time ripens with that same dignity,

that selflessness,

passes most courageously.

A wind is blowing.

Now the crimson ball of the sun

touches the horizon of the Masai grasslands.

When silence falls, confirming every will,

all grows still.

But that old lion merely looks on.

Though the setting sun

falls in his field of vision,

he sees no reason to glare,

lets the sun set

in a river of blood.

He seems unconcerned about anything happening

across the vast grasslands.

Today, his powerful rule of times gone by

is no more than a mere trifle.

He simply gazes off into the distance.

He gazes off into the distance

from across his enormous lifetime

without sorrow,

without any sorrow.

Finally, the lion bounds to its feet

and roars

at the world.

With that sound

every animal,

every tree and plant,

even the twilight after the sun has set, all

freeze in a silence full of dread ‑‑

why was that necessary?

A wind is blowing.

Beyond the lion’s tail

the full moon is rising.

Somewhere,

far away somewhere, an insect can be heard buzzing ‑‑

perhaps from far off Kilimanjaro?

Sunken Bells

Thank heaven for the sea.

If I could only have

one crazy wish,

be it that all the bells in this land,

every one,

might be hurled into the sea

and sunk down deep, way deep.

Other things would follow, one by one.

For a century or so

no sound of bells and such would be heard,

nothing of the sort at all --

how immensely melancholy that would be.

Then, once we are standing about

with the patience of skeletons,

all the sunken bells would ring

from the bottom of the sea.

Their chime

would come bursting out of the sea,

reverberating to every corner of the earth.

Last Night’s Dream

A few years ago,

somewhere in the Deccan Heights of India,

after I’d thrown away

everything in my pockets --

passport, notebook, water flask,

some Indian money and the like,

and with all those things

my so-called memory too --

sweating droplets

that evaporated before they could run,

after standing truly alone a while

why, dammit,

I was struck by the stare of a white-headed eagle

swooping down from on high

like an arrow aimed at the sky

piercing deep into a cow

died of old age.

Then, raising its head a moment,

it stopped gnawing the cow

and shot a glance at me.

I’m not sure if it’s time or myself that has passed.

Last night my dreams were filled

not with that wretched bird

but that old cow corpse

full of ignorance, and pierced

by the wretched bird.

I could not dream of anything else.

Turtle Time

Up in Korea’s eastern hills,

with a Chop

and a Chop a tree was felled,

chopped into pieces within the day,

chopped into ten blocks,

eleven;

there was no other way.

The blocks were carted away and finally

dumped

in a cesspool

where they remained,

completely forgotten.

Time passed like a tune,

while they spent three years in that filthy pool.

Sorrow and pain were of no avail

they lay abandoned, quite rotten, it seemed.

Yet a few of the blocks,

though they soaked in the cesspool,

stayed as sturdy as ever and didn’t rot.

When the cuckoo had sung for a hundred days,

they found themselves lying

in flowing water, goodness knows how.

From there they were dredged

and washed quite clean,

free of the stench of the cesspool.

Then they were finally

dumped

in a sheltered spot beneath the eaves.

In that shade

they dried very slowly --

as a sea turtle

after digging a hole in the sand at the tideline

lays its eggs in a pile, covers them over,

then very slowly returns to the sea,

just so they dried.

Another hundred days passed.

Now the blocks of wood

are as hard as stone,

lighter than a sheet of paper,

stony wood blocks

that will never rot in a thousand years.

Cut and shaped out of one of the blocks

a small bowl

stands here before me,

in which I shall offer up dawn-drawn, pure well water

on behalf of my distant love.

Out of the cesspool emerged a bowl

permeated with the blue

of Korea’s autumn skies,

the hues of jade hidden underground.

One small bowl is raised in offering

near the west coast of our land.

Just as the sea turtle

returns from distant seas,

just as the baby turtles return

once hatched from their eggs,

it is reverently raised in offering here.

Light Snow

Just two people’s eyes.

Nothing else.

Snow fell.

The time the two clutched each other’s hands, shivering,

unsure which hand was whose,

was their first.

The time the two darkly became one in their hearts,

unsure is this my heart

or whose,

was, what else?

their first. The time they embraced

then collapsed, unutterably sad, that time

each was unsure

who was who. . .

they shared such times, then died,

lie sleeping, buried here

and now, a burst of joy in this desolate landscape,

look! after remorse on the way back home,

brightly, brightly, light snow is falling.

Light snow, unsure whose it is.

And that is how it was.

Whispering (1998)

A Path in the Fields

Even in my usual clothes, somehow I feel fresh.

Deep within people are tears

forever unshed

even after ten or twenty years

unsure if they’re there or not

half or fully submerged.

I want to become someone like that.

Today I’ve gone out to meet those kind of tears.

Can I bear them easily?

Today the sky is unusually bright toward the west.

Morning dew jewels the grass to its roots.

Even when the dew at the blade tips

has vanished, the sodden paths across the fields

gleam like the hidden spirit of a newborn babe.

I wonder.

Sometimes people need this kind of path.

Even if they know nothing but their usual tasks,

they need a path to walk on for no reason

under the constantly appearing and vanishing clouds

like someone on a long journey

a path where they can yearn for something.

As they walk along the path, they have to meet the sound

of someone weeping, in the sky or on the earth, no telling which.

Singing Island

In the sea off my birthplace,

there were islands scattered here and there

in a most haphazard way.

Among them was the very tiny

Singing Island.

When gales came blowing off the West Sea

always, invariably,

the sound of singing could be heard

around that island.

They were songs of the souls of fishermen

drowned in storms

through the centuries,

who would wake whenever a gale blew

and sing for days night and day.

As I grew up within sight

of Singing Island

some great spirit entered me

and I became a singer, still roaming today.

Became a traveling singer, awkwardly singing

awkward songs

with moments, though, of solemnity.

Late Flowers

Like a river

bidden to come slowly murmuring round a bend.

Like the hills above such a river,

the shadows of those hills,

bidden to come passing over ridges,

to come back home with lowered heads

after wandering along other hillsides :

see how these few flowers are blooming,

after arriving so late.

If sorrow is half longing,

let’s be even more sorrowful.

Over now, the breathtaking season

when flowers came up in flocks

here and there

laughing brightly

then scattered in showers of petals

falling for days on troubled, wounded hearts

and at this lonely time

when other plants are deaf-mute,

after arriving so late,

they are quietly blooming, blank-faced,

with no sign of either smiles or sorrow.

Himalayan Storks

An ancient wind is blowing.

After a long wait

one stork flaps its wings.

Other storks likewise flap their wings.

Let’s fly away.

Let’s up and fly away.

Let’s fly up and away at last

from the heart of this desolate wilderness,

the 5000-meter-high Changtang Highlands of Tibet.

During their time there their guts

shrank two thirds,

as they must,

even their bone marrow

shrank

until their bones were hollow.

Before the snows came

they slept less and less,

with open eye, quickly waking.

That was not all.

They breathed less deeply day by day,

inhaling and exhaling very little,

only one last gasp kept deep inside.

Finally, they flew up,

wheeled once through the sky,

then soared away.

In the bitter cold

15,000 meters high

in howling gales

they rode the jet stream south,

southward, bodies emptied, on they flew.

Above the 8,000 meters of Kanchenjunga,

passing over the first and second peaks

of Annapurna,

they flew southward.

At last they descended

at the edge of dry brushland in Bihar.

Breathless, they settled here and there.

At first they were guests,

then awkward masters.

How could they know

that the Changtang Heights

they had left behind

would be their tomorrow

to which they must return?

Note : The poem traces the epic journey made each year by Himalayan storks, which spend the summer months in the Tibetan Changtang highlands then migrate over the highest peaks of the Himalayas (Kanchenjunga and Annapurna) to winter in India’s Bihar state. The poet describes the biological process by which the storks empty their bodies of all surplus weight in order to be able to fly sufficiently high.

Stars and Flowers

No matter how long we wait,

no matter how many stars we talk about,

the stars never get the least bit closer,

but simply hang there,

just beaming us light from billions of light years ago.

No matter how much we sing about flowers,

sing in later years

of childhood apricot flowers,

the flowers do not last any longer,

nothing of the kind.

They simply

bloom for a few days, as always, then fall,

simply fall, all at once, without any breeze.

In this desolate world, we talk

about stars,

sing about flowers,

our hearts leaping at mention of “my star” or “your flower”.

What puerile, senile, juvenile naïveté!

This Talking World

When the wind talks,

people’s hair flows out; skirts flutter.

When the wind keeps silent

people’s village flags will not wave.

When the sky talks,

people’s clothes all get soaked,

and people’s roofs get drenched,

drops plummeting from the eaves.

When flowers talk,

people’s faces beam brightly.

Somewhere beyond the sea, in a land of the East,

everything is turning to waves, the sound of waves.

Childhood Nightsoil

All of sacred nature must rot.

When I was a child,

every house had a big heap of nightsoil.

Reassuring stuff.

When you stirred it up,

the deeper you went, the more rotten it was.

Feh!

There was nothing make‑believe about it

and certainly

we felt no need for any god to come down to us.

Feh!

That thick stench took your breath away:

it was a huge world,.

Song

The wind blows.

Now

you are grass.

You are a tree.

The wind blows some more.

The twilight sea

crashes on the shore.

We all become what we are to be.

Sorrow

One evening early in 1940

my grandfather

cradled a sick goose in his arms

all night, trying to save its life.

Recalling that, I felt sad all day.

Grandson of my grandfather,

I wonder : wandering through life

when have I ever saved a life?

Haven’t I rather lived

everyday life’s blessed ordinariness

just whistling listlessly?

Even the sorrow in pigeons’ cooing

is not acceptable

so from tomorrow,

from tomorrow,

even if I’m only a ghost,

standing with trees great and small

I must long sway in the rising wind.

Where My Soul Will Go

Down to the very bottom of everything,

the Pacific Ocean,

to the bottom of the sea, two thousand fathoms deep,

down you go, sex,

and once there,

serenely

enduring pressures equal to rocks

weighing tons,

consider the sex life of happy, deep-water crabs.

Maybe that darkness is where my soul will go, trembling?

Meeting Myself

Like the bare groves of late November,

free yourself

of everything under the heavens

so it all can fall asleep.

Tight-lipped pines and firs

alone stand buried in the green of their needles.

So rid yourself of everything.

All the trees together

barely manage to dangle a few dry leaves.

Having nowhere to hide,

a bird flies off,

letting a feather fall.

In that moment of poverty I suddenly stepped on a skeleton.

Winter Waterfall

I climbed a valley up Kariwang Mountain in Chungsun,

empty-handed as I followed the curving path.

How useless “enlightenment” is,

honest as an eyebrow though it may be.

Without so much as a lie to offer,

the sky twanged blue,

while below, the snow piled high.

Beneath the mountains was such harmonious stillness

that I felt embarrassed by my steaming breath.

I was forced to turn back.

Just then

I saw him standing there.

I was taken by surprise

but not he.

He was myself long ago.

Keep going.

You must.

The waterfall you must find

will appear, hiding round a corner of the mountain.

Soon,

once the sound of the falls grows silent,

the constantly waiting waterfall will appear,

a mass of ice, a mass of icicles, your own flesh.

Is it a phantom? One butterfly hovers,

imagined in someone’s lonely heart.

The sound of the waterfall will soon appear.

All the other things will appear then as well,

even flowers,

though it’s not yet spring.

Note : Chongson lies east of Seoul toward the east coast, in Kangwon Province.

Laborer

Unusual, most unusual.

That man only had one eye.

It took him a whole thirty minutes

to mould just one set of bricks.

If he wasn’t satisfied

he’d start over,

again and again.

His boss fired him.

He started working on his own.

Those bricks sold quite well.

Unusual.

Now it took that man a whole ten minutes

to lay a single brick.

After he’d finished,

he’d stretch his neck a couple of times

then start laying again.

His foreman fired him,

but before he died

he completed a house ‑‑

his dream come true.

That house would stand firm for years to come.

Unusual, so unusual.

That man used to hammer nails.

After he’d done,

he’d hammer them some more

to keep them from ever getting out.

That hammer had a great time.

It really knew how to love someone.

Reunion

One day, soon after I emerged from my fourth time in prison,

still under house arrest,

I drew a bird on a thousand‑won bill

like a ten‑year‑old child would.

Then I spent it.

Six years passed.

On February 16, 1998

the bill with my drawing

came back to me.

The bill I had spent in Ansong

crossed the sea and came back to me

in a bar opposite my hotel in Cheju Island.

“What are you doing here?

Dear old bill! Long time no see!”

Since Antiquity

In a world like ours there’s plenty to do, even for lugworms.

As the price

for one holy man’s coming

thousands of extremely

unholy men come along too.

I really wonder why Buddha ever bothered to come.

The Himalayas (2000)

Longing for Salinger

Today I threw away the courage metaphors give;

I am I and

you are you.

All power and falsehood are junk—

the man who said

and did not say that—

Jerome David Salinger:

I miss you.

Where are you?

Born in the summer of 1919,

81 this year:

are you somewhere in western North America?

Or are you in the barley-fields

of Tibet with your grizzled eyebrows,

accustomed to the limited oxygen

at four thousand meters and more?

The boy Holden in your story wanted

to be the catcher in the rye. His boyish innocence

can never be safe in any country,

under the skies of any country.

Torn apart

torn apart and bleeding:

that’s innocence.

Where are you?

Say, is ‘whereabouts unknown’ the only liberation?

Where are you?

In the streets of Tibet’s Darchen

I was you instead of me.

Tibetan Night

Several floors

above any other night on earth

there was the Tibetan night.

Lengthy.

Lengthy meaning at least ten times ten-thousand years.

Within darkness fermenting

darknesses were becoming wine.

Next morning as the sunshine

spread from the rocks of ice

8000 meters up—

here, there

the remaining dead-drunk darkness

awoke the night around the nomads’ tents.

Strange.

Tibet has no need of religion

yet it’s all nothing but religion.

Om Mani Padme Hum.

It has no need of stray dogs,

yet stray dogs were roaming the plains.

Om Mani Padme Hum.

Note: Om Mani Padme Hum is a Sanksrit formula meaning, literally, “Om, jewel in the lotus, hum” (“Om” and “hum” being “seed syllables”). The oldest and perhaps most important mantra of Tibetan Buddhism (in Tibetan ‘om mani peme hung’), there are a range of explanations and levels of interpretation. The jewel can represent the mind of enlightenment which arises in the lotus of human consciousness, for example.

Light

The world was steeped in light.

Quite impossible

for one woman

to love one man.

One man

could never love then hate one woman.

Steeped in light.

Intellectuals rotted deep in ignorance.

Far off mountains

were very close.

Standing at the far western end of the Changtang Plateau,

I had no shadow.

Even shadows

even shadows were all light.

Deep at night the stars poured down torrents of starlight,

one mass of light.

Inside, my guts squirmed brightly, brightly.

Inside the sky above the central Himalayas

inside the blizzards

inside the clouds

everything was utterly steeped in light.

Graciously,

one mass of light deigned to pass very near before me like a spy.

Manasarova Lake

A sea floating high above the sky—

the shores I trod

were not earth but heaven.

Heaven had come down to earth,

earth had gone up to heaven

and meeting

had become an ancient heaven.

On Manasarova Lake

there was not one little boat.

All there was

was one pair of mandarin ducks.

Like wooden carvings.

In that vast sky sea

even without love

there was a remnant of everything else sacred in this world.

Sky Burial

Halfway up a mountain, the burial place was a mound of pebbles.

Among the pebbles

some miniature trees had sprouted.

On a flat rock

a corpse lay stiff.

The cutting was skillfully done.

The guts were drawn out.

Then the young son, like a surgeon

cut out the heart and examined it.

The gall bladder and kidneys were examined in turn.

The head was treated as a head should be,

the backbone as a backbone.

The ribs were stripped in a place to one side.

Blowing a bone flute, the officiant went down the hill.

No sooner was he gone

than from above a large vulture

landed. Furling its wings,

it began to gorge itself.

A little later a big raven arrived

and ate its fill.

Then

other birds alighted.

The wind did not stay quiet but rose and swept fiercely across the mountainside.

Optical Illusion

It’s very close.

It’s very clear.

Just over there.

Yet even after a whole day’s journey

it’s still as far off, unreachable.

Far-off close-seeming spot.

I reckon people need far-off people like that.

Very close by.

A World Fit to Live In

The Changtang Plateau was no barren waste.

It was a world fit to live in.

The tailless mouse

was as cute as baby Buddha

as baby Yashodara.

Plunging into its hole and not emerging again.

Those hills,

families of monkeys

yaks

goats

antelopes

A crow flew casually away, killing time.

An eagle

was hovering stationary in the sky.

Flowers and grass laughed aloud.

Just look at that circus eagle up there!

Very difficult; you’d think it was a stone.

Absolutely stationary.

That’s what they were laughing about.

Name

In the Himalayan world

considerable peaks go unnoticed.

Only

peaks of 7000 meters, or

7500 meters,

have been given this or that

name.

It’s excellent so.

Since there are still far more peaks

without names

than have names,

this world is still radically young.

Do you have something to say?

Nothing.

Mount Sumi

Sumerian mountain Mount Sumi—

that mountain’s a great hero’s penis.

Names like “navel of the world”

or “core of creation” fall short.

It’s simply a penis.

Beyond the Himalayas, a youth from south India

relying on rumors (relying on rumors)

hearing reports of Mount Sumi

after 27 years reached it

as an old man. It was simply a penis.

In that case, it’s best you (quick) get back home

and embrace the wife you left behind.

That’s the navel of the world.

That’s the core of creation.

Let the gate open, let honey flow: there

the penis is in the lotus.

Manaslova Lake

That lake stands

as mother to ten thousand rivers;

in the rainy season

three hundred swans alight on it together in splendor

and the reason it’s obliged to be mother to ten thousand rivers

is the male organ of Mount Sumi

looming far away.

Longing pliantly

it always contains the shadows of new snowy peaks.

Ah, Whiteness

Ah, whiteness!

Merciless whiteness of the Himalayan heights!

Loathsome.

All day long

I longed for nightfall.

Even by night

the whiteness would not vanish from my heart.

I vomited.

Sticking a finger down my throat

I vomited up the remaining whiteness.

I longed to join a gang.

I longed to join a suicide squad.

Until I later came gradually to love whiteness again

the forty peaks of the Himalayas became a gasping torment.

With Never a Mirror

Washing with wind, fine.

Washing with sunshine, fine.

Body never washed

for a year, twelve months, thirteen

today, just as it is, fine.

Not even washed at birth,

a child as it is, fine.

Growing up as it is, fine.

Mirrors and things are useless.

beneath the vast sky.

Me looking at that mountain

and that mountain looking at me. Fine!

Furnace

The solar furnace on the roof

of every house in Lhasa

lying there baring its belly to the sky.

Welcome.

Very good sunlight

is forced to come down, dazzled, by that furnace’s charming temptation.

Penetrated by the sunlight

it gradually grows warm.

Ah, climax of pleasure;

lewd talk is holy.

Warmer.

The furnace once hot, the water starts to boil.

Ah, ejaculation of despair.

One mouthful of despondency’s butter-tea grows cold.

Confession

I have something I want to say in secret.

In the Himalayas

there was nothing but the Himalayas.

Unless I was determined to die

anywhere in the Himalayas,

there was nothing to bring back

I was just so happy to get away from there.

I had such bad dysentery

the present spanned five years before

and five years after.

Coming back down to four thousand meters, I felt at home.

Reaching Lhasa at 3700 meters, I felt at home.

A sound rose from the vertebra of my dried spine.

And I fell into a deep sleep.

South and North (2000)

Hadan

I have just come from burying you whom I loved,

and now I am quietly standing here

in the reed beds of Hadan on the lower reaches of Nakdong River.

The dry reeds of early winter shake a little.

The lengthy river goes slowly on its way,

sometimes seeming weary, then not seeming weary,

while here,

desolate, the jewels of the tears you shed

are in my eyes

and your high-pitched laugh, from when you were alive,

is with me, in my ears.

With that, what need can there be for anything more?

There’s not even anything to drink.

Pyongyang

While a century has passed,

this place has kept a dignity

hard to maintain.

A nation’s heart for 50 years –

surely this place should become a little lighter

after fifty years.

May it not be burdened by weighty rocks or weighty air.

May it not be trapped by heavy tasks.

Here,

may one weighty god

not subdue many other gods.

At least, transcending ancient dignity

with the freedom of neolithic days

under neolithic skies with their cottony clouds,

here in today’s world

may you be the city with the most beautiful ancestors.

After fifty years

may you be a city where butterflies flutter.

Below Taech’ong Peak

I come down from Pongjong Hermitage

below Taech’ong Peak without regrets.

My grandmother was always praying.

My maternal grandmother used to pray.

My mother would pray too.

I long to be born in a world without prayer.

On this cold day:

a few edelweiss flowers.

The pines of Chinp’a-ri

I was there in the dreams of lengthy nights,

in Yongsan-ri, in Yokp’o on the outskirts of Pyongyang.

Before, it was called Mujin-ri.

Some time before that, Chinp’a-ri.

That’s why even now, on people’s lips

instead of the new name of Yongsan-ri

you still hear it called Chinp’a-ri

Chinpa-ri.

The clustered tombs of Chinp’a-ri lay there.

A strange business, it was.

As you stood looking quietly

that cluster of tombs would turn into a great ship

that seemed to be floating

at sea with nothing in sight but the horizon.

The world remained as before,

only that cluster of tombs seems to be setting out.

It’s as if time turns some places into ships.

In 277 BC,

when the tomb of young Ko Chu-mong, only twenty-two,

was transferred here,

twenty other tombs came

accompanying his tomb

to form this otherworldly village.

Koguryo was the largest nation, then,

larger than Sou or Tang,

so that Sou, invading, was defeated.

Tang invaded later

and its emperor was blinded.

Now it’s extremely quiet.

They seem to be buried in the sound of wind in pines

and to be setting out all day long.

On the walls of the chambers in tombs one and four

was painted a pair of splendid pines

and today outside the tombs

in a spitting image of those paintings

pine trees form a grove.

During the Choson Era a fire broke out in the grove

by the fault of the local administrator.

The Pyongyang inspector, learning what had happened

reacted quite mercifully.

As punishment, he ordered the official

to cross the sea to far off Cheju Island,

to bring back pines from there and plant them.

In fact, it was a dreadful punishment.

The official was already old

by the time he brought back the Cheju pines and planted them.

Ten years later he was dead, and the pines were growing luxuriantly.

It was far inland

yet the grove would ring with the sound of the waves on Cheju’s shores.

That’s why the clustered tombs at Chinp’a-ri

are island tombs floating on the sea,

pine tree islands floating on the sea.

Islands ringing with the wind in pines and the breaking waves,

sounds from old Koguryo and Cheju’s Tamra kingdom.

Still now,

bringing farthest north and farthest south together,

on windless days

the pines in the paintings in the tombs emerge.

The stone pagoda at Poyon Temple

I wanted to pray.

The courtyard was white as if with sprinkled salt,

Myohyang Mountain was already remote.

Poyon Temple courtyard—

once here, for every kind of task

there must be an ending, not a beginning.

Look

at the octagonal, thirteen-storied pagoda

standing in the center of the yard

yet seeming separate,

withdrawn, far off

As I gazed up, the pagoda

soared unrestrainedly

into the air, where its thirteenth level ended

and an invisible pagoda continued soaring upward

tier upon tier.

At the angles of each octagonal tier

like tiny maidens

104 wind bells hung silent.

When the wind blew

each tinkled like a sweet maiden’s mouth.

In the grounds of Poyon Temple flowers bloomed

but with ears blocked

I could not hear those sounds.

What’s the point of going to the other world outside

these ten billion worlds

Here is where it is.

Here is where it is

and as I turned, my shadow turned.

Once upon a time I was seaweed roots beneath the sea,

destined to burn without leaving ash

turning, turning

and the pagoda turned too.

Belatedly I was obliged to learn that.

Kulp’o-ri

Home of my previous life!

In the north-east part of our land, Kulp’o-ri near Unggi

There my old days were,

the previous years of my life,

the previous years of my grandfather were modestly alive there.

Not scattered about,

but alive, layer upon layer.

Beside the sea at Okjo in Old Choson times

more than a thousand years before ancient China

in the first Bronze Age

they had copper knifes shaped like lyres.

They laughed to the sound of the waves.

Alive, in a hovel half underground,

dead, in a tomb of mud or stone.

The level below was the New Stone Age.

The level below that was the Old Stone Age.

Look, a diluvial bone awl has just been plucked out

and shines in the sun.

Somewhere in the south a brass sword came to light,

gleamed in the light of the sun behind clouds.

In my skull, my teeth grinned with glee, in x-ray.

Old days, today, fine days all.

The shade beneath that old dolmen is like my sister,

my long-lost sister.

The Yalu River

Long ago, when I was young and owned nothing,

time came and went all day for free.

Once, a wounded leg keeping me from walking,

I spent a whole day alone with the mildew in an abandoned house,

longing to write a poem as epic as the Yalu River.

Even when Korea was all overrun by Japan

the Yalu River went flowing on.

Even when they left Korea behind and overran Manchuria

the Yalu River went flowing on.

Flowing, flowing and joining the sea,

it vanishes without regret.

I longed to become that river

I longed to become that river’s epic.

No matter that there might be beautiful places

along the banks of that long long river,

or that the landscape

might be now dull, now

grim, now bleak, yet

flowing on,

undergoing every kind of thing brought about

by the regular passage of night and day,

flowing on and bearing with it every kind of thought . . .

And why not?

Imagine a world brought into being by beautiful people alone—

that would be a living hell!

No, not

that, not that.

The banks along the long course of the Yalu

have always had weary lives

and unjust deaths.

I longed to become the epic of that kind of river.

Not only I.

Someone before me

had sung: Ah, the Yalu flows . . .

Following his preface,

I longed to write a poem as epic as the Yalu River.

Orphans

There were many orphans at the time of the Japanese invasions

in the sixteenth century.

Their fathers were dead,

and their mothers, taken prisoner, killed themselves.

The children were left,

alone, crying,

crying then forgetting how to cry.

Some died,

some survived.

Life belonged to the survivors.

Continuing on from that mob of orphans,

nowadays we falsify our family trees

so that they extend to a host of descendants.

During the savage three years of war

from June 1950

there were any number of orphans

in south and north Korea.

In South Korea we had over two thousand orphanages

receiving American relief goods.

The directors embezzled whatever they could,

the orphans starved and were mistreated every night.

I wonder if there were as many orphans in North Korea.

They had no relief goods from another country.

They had to make do with plain water,

and either survive or die.

One woman who had lost her own children

gathered together two hundred and fifty war orphans

at Songdowon near Wonsan city in North Korea

and raised them as her own family.

Today, that house has been turned into an International Boy Scouts’ Camp

but no boys come from other countries,

not even from South Korea,

so for a long time it has lain idle and empty.

Yet today’s world is not without its orphans.

More than ever, today’s world is full of the scorched solitude

of orphans, widows, wanderers, old people.

Women picking apple blossom

What a snowy winter that was.

Then spring came,

like a door opening.

Round Kuwol Mountain haze spread far and wide.

Still the world is a lonely place

and spring just came.

Apple trees began to blossom.

at the foot of Kuwol Mountain

women from Unyul

women from Changyon in the county beyond

girls from Songhwa set off along the road.

Towels wrapping their heads, they were going,

ten people at a time,

twenty people,

to the orchards at Hwangju and Sariwon

to nip out the apple blossom.

There being too many flowers,

they were going to thin them out, leaving just a few.

As they walked along,

as they passed through this village and that,

the songs they sang

were touching,

vaguely mournful.

Once they pass the crest of the hill

the sound of their singing fades into the distance.

The villages’ unmarried men, missing them,

chuck stones at random,

finally drive away the dogs come out in pursuit.

The women and girls coming to nip out the apple flowers

take three or four days

to reach the orchard.

The next group of women

arrives a few days later.

They spent the night in the women’s quarters

in the villages they pass,

leaving a sheet of dried seaweed from Changyon in exchange for their food.

And some dried fish from Songhwa.

At last in Sariwon orchard, in Hwangju orchard,

among the pale green leaves on the apple trees

white apple blossom flowered in profusion.

All across the orchard

as the women from Unyul, women from Changyon,

girls from Songhwa nipped off apple blossom,

one would sing, another would listen.

All the while unresting

stretching arms, stretching eyes,

they skillfully nip out the high-up flowers.

Completing their work after a few days,

on the way back home,

they discuss whether or not to visit Songbul Temple in Mount Chongbang.

Let daughters in law work in spring sun

let your own daughters work in autumn sun

as this saying goes,

these women had faces deeply sunburned in spring sunshine.

They were obliged to go home, of course.

Obliged to go home, of course.

They discuss whether or not to drop by at Bongsan Fair

but they had to go straight home, of course.

They had rabbit-like babies at home,

They had stake-like husbands, so were obliged to go home.

When the wind blew from in front, embracing it, obliged to go;

when the wind blew from behind, shouldering it, obliged to go .

Kwangju

Once you’re born there,

it’s a city fit to be loved to the point of tedium.

After the tedious summer rains are past

everywhere you look

it’s a city where clinging rainbows melt away.

It’s a city of premonitions, rather,

whose children

prefer tomorrows to todays;

a city that has killed so many possibilities.

Its adults

have had so many more yesterdays

than todays.

A city where today is powerless.

If you go there

you are yesterday’s

and the distant future’s.

Yet

the day the tanks came was today.

City of death.

DMZ

Thanks are due for the last fifty-five years

to Korea’s armistice line, six hundred ri long—

farmland whose former owners

can only lament, stamping their feet

by day and night,

land untouched safe inside the demilitarized zone.

Weeds no one ever tries to control,

insects on weeds

a tree,

trees,

creatures, tiny creatures, microbes.

For all your sakes, may the DMZ

endure for ever.

Expand in all directions,

DMZ.

You spectral hopes of North-East Asia, come,

gather here, and expand . . .

expand . . .

Flowers of a Moment (2001)

At sunset

only one wish –

to become a wolf

beneath a fat full moon

I have spent the whole day being someone else’s tale again

and as I journey homeward

the trees are watching me

In Mount Kariwang in Chongson, Kangwon Province

the falling streams

are busy but busier are

the minnows, the carplings

swimming upwards

against the current

Rowing with just one oar

I lost that oar

For the first time I looked round at the wide stretch of water

Outside the cave the howling wind and rain

inside

the silent speech of bats filling the ceiling

Summer vacation – the primary school classrooms are quiet

In one classroom

there’s a harmonium where

the Fa in the scale is dead

In that classroom is the framed

national flag they hung there forty-two years ago

and in that classroom

remain

the daring graffiti of times gone by

“Kim Ok-ja has the biggest boobs”

In front of the photographer’s window display

a woman who cannot bear children

gazes smiling at a photo of a one-year-old child.

“I’ve come, dear

The harsh winter’s over now”

His wife’s tomb laughs quietly

Yes, some say they can recall a thousand years

and some say they have already visited the next thousand years

On a windy day

I am waiting for a bus

We went to Auschwitz

saw the mounds of glasses

saw the piles of shoes

On the way back

we each stared out of a different window

Following the tracks of an animal in the snow

I looked back at my own tracks

Two people are eating

sitting facing each other

An ordinary everyday thing

and at the same time

the best thing

Like they say, it’s love

As I dreamed last night

two lines of a poem emerged

but on waking up

I had lost one

Here is what survived –

moon and snow shine bright, whitening the night

but the other line is nowhere

Without a sound

resin buried underground is turning into amber

while up above the first snow is falling

Along the path

a roebuck

is quietly contemplating the moon in a stream

What is this world?

Here’s a butterfly fluttering by

and there’s a spider’s web

In the old days, poets used to say

the nation is lost

yet the mountains and rivers still survive

Nowadays, poets say

the mountains and rivers are lost

yet the nation still survives

Tomorrow, poets will say

The mountains and rivers are lost

the nation is lost

you

and I are all lost

Alas

The beak of a chick pecking at feed—

my studies are far from complete

When the stalls were closing last market day

I suddenly glimpsed

Samman’s ma who died last year

I suppose she came back to do some shopping

Mother hen outside the egg

baby chick inside the egg –

the two are really one single body

What’s it all mean?

Peach blossom petals

have been drifting all day long into the empty house

Thirty years ago

a starving woman saw

a thousand sacks of rice in a mirage

Everything outside my home

is my teacher

Master horse shit

Master cow shit

Master children’s freckles

That business tycoon’s tremendous mansion –

the despair of beggars

the hope of thieves

Why?

A bright day

busy with questions from a five-year-old

Surely that child knows

that without those Why’s

everything would be nothing

It is said that nothing can become new

unless it first turns to ashes

For a whole decade

my misfortune was not having turned to ashes

Burning a mound of dead leaves in late autumn I want to weep

Up the hilltop slope of the slum

a man walked as sleet fell

A dog came dashing out

Just look at that dog’s tail!

Last night, several of you were crying

At dawn, I realize

hey, you’re alone!

Little insect,

I’m awake, I’m your comrade

Seoul Prison, Block 5, Cell 1

A warship moves through the sea

near Paekryong Island in the Yellow Sea

Not one seagull’s in sight

The sea

looks as if someone has disappeared in it

I’m carrying an empty soju bottle