SONGS FOR TOMORROW
by KO UN
Translated by
Brother Anthony of Taizé
Young-Moo Kim
Gary Gach
CONTENTS
1 E A R L Y P O E M S
[1960 - 1970]
YOUNG PEOPLE'S SONGS OF THE FOUR SEASONS
THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT OF THE MONTH
Poems from A Traveller¡¯s Loneliness
2 T U R N I N G P O I N T
[1971-1980]
WOODBLOCKS OF BUDDHIST SCRIPTURE
3 H O M E L A N D S T A R S [1981-1990]
CROSSING RICE FIELDS AT NIGHTFALL
THIS LAND STILL HAS ITS LIVING SPRINGS
4 1
0 , 0 0 0 L I V E S [begun 1986]
THE COUPLE RUNNING THE GENERAL STORE
5 W
I N D Y D A Y S [1991 - 2000]
Poems from What¡¯s That? (1991)
Poems from Sea Diamond Mountain (1991)
THE UPPER REACHES OF SŎMJIN
RIVER
ON THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE AT NAMHAE
Poems from Songs for Tomorrow (1993)
Poems from The Road Not Yet Traveled
(1993)
Poems from A Memorial Stone (1997)
They live
in a world all their own.
Their spirits float
below the cliffs and high above.
They are the echoes of wind
nightsound
the wind in the pines.
On bare mountain slopes
rocks are resting.
Autumn is coming.
As the sound of the wind-bells
drops weeping from the rock-perched eaves
to temple courtyards
they live
in a world of their own.
I have left all that behind, forgotten it,
yet now comes a wish to return to the slopes
swept by their floating spirits
where
they live
they
live
Note: Ch'ŏn-ŭn Temple is near the town of Kurye, at
the foot of Nogodan Ridge, the southwestern extremity of Chiri Mountain.
A poet is born within the cracks
of crime -- fraud, theft, violence, murder --
in some obscure corner of the world.
The poet's words creep into the cracks
within the foulest of curses ever sworn
as heard in a city's poorest, roughest slums,
and for a time those words rule.
Then, out of all of today's truth seeping through
the cracks in all the evil and the lies, the poet
forms one single cry. Then
other hearts beat it to death.
For sure, a poet's heart is doomed.
Sing!
Yesterday's song
is today's death.
Sing!
Today's song is tomorrow.
A song, any song,
has revolution in it.
Sing!
Ah, mother¡¯s surely not asleep
and things that flow by night, night
and day,
are all silent now so I wonder
how far away the murmur of water
that went on all autumn has gone to sleep
ah, so cold and full of joy. And when that¡¯s done,
darkness, see my heart reflected
in the water's murmur emerging from within me.
Wave, the spring rain falls
and dies on your sleeping silence.
Dark in the water, night soars up.
Yet, wave,
from the power of the spring rain
on your sleeping water,
far-away rocks are changed to spring.
Above this water where we two lie sleeping
looms a rocky mass, all silence.
But still the spring rain falls and dies.
No matter how deeply I sleep
the moonlit night
will remain as bright as ever.
If I wake with a start
turn and nestle down again
once my eyes are closed
the moonlight trapped inside them
becomes part of me.
But are the clouds washed pure?
Pure enough for the moon
as it drops behind the western hills?
Now my sleep will be a shadow of sleep,
a shadow cast on a moonlit night.
No one comes to visit you now, but your descendants
will be coming, one by one.
Last night, an insect sang on all alone after the
rest had stopped,
darkening the night.
This autumn morning, you're fast asleep, as
precious dew evaporates.
As sunlight shines down further off, the grass tips
gleam.
And near the place of early spring easter-lilies,
wild chrysanthemums
cluster now,
blooming for just a few days.
All you once treasured has vanished, but occasional
tombstones live on, amazed.
Though your bones cry out in this autumn like a
rook's feathers,
here in the world where you once lived it may not
be so very sad.
Only a man still alive, only a real man,
is driven by autumn to wander along mountain trails
where no house stands.
No temples should be there, either.
You've completed your lives in this world, left
only a small death-anniversary behind,
and now there's no time-past in the world; you
alone bring time-past into being.
Close to the earth, a yellow butterfly flies by, by
chance perhaps, or perhaps by mistake,
and all autumn long keeps repeating over a tomb
that there are graves in heaven, too.
No one comes visiting you now, you simply lie here
in your graves;
your descendants will be coming soon.
spring
I stood beside your little grave and gazed.
The unfamiliar haze of my flesh trembled
in respondse to the haze nearby.
Sorrow of that village where
invisible things become newly visible all winter long.
A stream flows by, nourishing roots of spurge.
My springtime seems to have returned along meadows
with their infant grass
intent on putting an end to a day's agony of
falling spring rain.
And in the spring even your grave has been made
new.
After waiting a while for something, I left again.
summer
I long to cross the West Sea and spend a month on Sŏnyu
Island.
It's still just as when you lived there as a child.
Yet if you gather all your conch shells and fill
them
with the monotonous pulse of the shore you used to
tread,
what eons will emerge from them.
Not yielding to anyone's plea, I long for that
island.
Summer is always more today than yesterday.
The ocean seems bluer to first love and to sorrow.
I'll forever forget the loneliness of the angel
robed in old-fashioned clothes
and I won't cross over to the island, won't cross
over.
autumn
Descending from a train, at every rural station
banks of cosmos were blossoming amidst the coughing
and from the heavens your eyelids were drooping.
As night grew deeper, the stars gave birth.
On an empty table heaped with your death
I happened to receive a brief letter.
A letter is always a death, and a life.
Insects in autumn meadows die splendidly only if
leaves are
blown from the trees, not simply falling,
and likewise falls the leaf of your
fingerprint voice.
winter
Can I hear news of the winter when your bones were
laid to rest?
If only I could return once to your graveside, just
once at least,
and write with a wretched pencil stub, remembering
the world,
and weep, because there's nothing more to write.
Once a snowflake clung to your distant, childish lips
and melted.
But there was nothing to be done. All was heaven's
will.
I wished winter wouldn't leave, although I had to.
No matter how well we withstood winter cold as
children,
it became a short-lived spirit and hid, once snow
fell.
Now, longing for you has become the only thing
equal to you.
I would fall asleep in your death.
Thanks to these leaves of the June wood-oil tree,
your generous heart grows broad and supple.
At nightfall, the twilight ought to briefly linger,
then fade over the fields.
When I look up at the hills, it seems I've been
looking for several days,
as if I alone am aware of the things of the world
beyond,
and already the field mice are busy down the path
to Choch'ŏn,
while some lettuce withers away at the foot of a
low wall.
Shaking their heads, oxen and horses plod home
chewing empty cud, ignoring the horse-pearl tree
flowers.
I sense that having one thing
is already far too much.
Over there in the twilight a child stops crying.
A waning moon rises late for pretty Sehwa in
Choch¡¯ŏn.
It keeps telling me: Grow old.
Note: The places named are in Cheju Island.
There's a trail uphill that leads somewhere.
After reading just a few lines written in an old
dead tongue
I have to head for that hill
wearing canvas shoes made from a gray satchel.
Somewhere a lost object is in a hurry to be found.
There's a trail uphill that leads somewhere.
The text on the next page of a book is waiting
and someone is listening there, having brought a
dead tongue to life.
With the crunch of dead leaves underfoot
and the sunlight lingering on my worn clothes,
I sense that my heart is growing several times
wider.
That object must be somewhere inside.
An unfamiliar grasshopper jumps, startled by a
sneeze
provoked by the spicy odor of dry grass or fodder.
The first day is colder than the thirty-first,
yet the lost object is still nowhere around.
There's a trail uphill that leads somewhere.
At home, some elder's first death anniversary
awaits.
Behind me someone is pestering my heart,
saying: there, there, or there,
but to me it's full of reconciliation; there's
nothing there.
Ultimately, I suppose, that lost object will
likewise be named in a dead tongue.
This is the loneliest spot in the country on New
Year's Day.
I've spent the whole long winter here,
devoid of everything.
It's been a week already since the boats stopped
running.
Chuja Island goes on getting smaller
until sad eyes cannot see it.
Don't overturn the glass from which you drank.
Once you're past thirty,
you can make friends with an empty glass.
Tell me, wind: what can I hope for on New Year's
Day on this remote island?
After some tedious, very tedious reading
by the light of a small oil lamp,
I mutter a single drunken line
but vowels alone can't make it heard
as far as that widower's tomb out there.
So, wind: let none live here but those who will die
here.
Endurance is the greatest journey of all.
Even if the boats are completely overwhelmed by the
gale,
I'm going to set out, though I've got no overcoat.
Tell me again, wind: what more can I hope for on
New Year's Day?
From the guts of a boarding house, coughs flee
one after another, that's all I can hear..
One day, they'll return, transformed into the local
dialect.
Ah, New Year's greetings, buried alive by Cheju
Island's wild whirlwinds.
The scent of hay from last autumn's rich harvest is
truly potent.
Out behind the deathly silent village
naked young women gather armfuls of moonlight.
Now for the very first time It seems they long to
be mothers.
Stay where you are, flying fox hidden in the
vegetable patch.
Every insect¡¯s life has been renewed.
What did I see reflected on the surface of a bowl
of water
on which the moon was blazing bright?
Young girls struck by the sound of rain ceasing.
My my my, oh my! Let¡¯s go!
On this night overflowing with milk, what we see
are manifest signs of pregnancy. Conception.
To conceive a child.
In remote, illiterate villages, lamps are being put
out.
Let's go. Beyond the sound of rain,
let's go back to where girls once offered their
naked bodies.
A few days ago one of the dead came back from the
tomb.
Wearing the same old smile, his everyday clothes
restored from the ashes,
he gives a full account of himself. All around him shines
a watery light.
He talks his full, then leaves like a letter.
Beside me my young brother, body and heart
purified, sees him off.
We spend every afternoon like this, greeting and
saying goodbye.
Occasionally I hear the dead of ancient Korea
talking.
They usually omit a few things, I think.
How could they reveal everything in one brief
resurrection?
Their story, before and after they died, is more
than a few words can express.
After seeing them off, my brother stays silent like
an empty bowl.
Dressed lightly, he always welcomes our visitors
from beyond,
with clear glass barriers of taboo lining the
hallway.
Responding simply in a quiet voice to what they
say,
his heart is open, ready to receive everything,
alone.
Every afternoon we welcome and send off guests from
beyond the tomb.
The light beyond the window is a sundial by which
we tell the time.
Each word my brother hears from the dead
is first dried in the sun, then preserved.
Truly, this world is the other world, huge and
vast;
this world is a tomb.
Tomorrow, let's not send off those that come, let's
have them live with us.
I'd like to buy her some toffee
but I don't have a daughter
as I pass a sidewalk store.
*
Late one night I seemed not to exist;
turning over,
forget the sound of rain, I resolved,
forget even the sound of rain next year, and the
year after.
*
A man whistling as he cooks seaweed soup
after his young wife has given birth.
*
Frogs croaking in flooded paddies -
if there really is a world beyond,
echo far enough so my dead brother can hear.
*
A boat whistles in the night.
For a moment I too long to sail away
but merely pull the blanket up over the kids.
*
A poplar tree stands tight-lipped in the night;
it must have muttered something excessive
*
I don't know. I don't know.
After one kiss the world's quite changed.
In thousandfold
ten-thousandfold darkest night
one flower's bloomed
after screaming
alone.
Close beside it
a red flower's
bloomed
speechless as iron.
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 heaped with all that¡¯s dead.
Our job is to bury that all day long
and establish a new world there.
Ah, silence!
Silences scattered all across Korea, South and North,
paddies and meadows:
come back!
What folk in days past bequeathed us was days with
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 paternal cough preserved
in rotten manure.
Silence is there on the blank page of an era unable
to write,
there in the roots between rocks on a cliff -
on 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 a gigantic silence
and convene a solemn assembly of silence.
Come back, silence more frightening than any shout,
than any fierce, bestial howl.
Scatter all of Korea's silences
across Asia, Africa, the Indian Ocean.
Come back. One single silence is no silence at all.
One single sound is sound
but 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 up by an ancient ghost -
let all
depart that should depart, and you, silence, come back.
Dry up all the lies with the greatest silence on
earth. The right
time is autumn.
Sink down deep, Korean peninsula, for three whole centuries,
say,
till nothing is left above the waves,
no matter how hard one searches,
under heaven's arch over the sea.
Nothing.
Then, once the whole landscape has been soaked in
the sea
like the wood where the Buddhist scriptures were
carved,
rise up again, three centuries or so later.
Sun, moon, stars, snowstorms,
stay as you are, repulsive things,
and once the country's tawdry powers are dead,
bring the land up again, floating lightly, quite
empty.
Establish there a new nation
of new flowers, new harvests.
Let the people speak words long forgotten,
rediscovered.
Let them speak a truth common to all.
Yes! Declare that now the holy one is everybody,
since they, like wood-carved scriptures, remain
intact.
Korean Peninsula! Korean land!
The present condition will not do!
Away with mass-games! No more mass-games!
Let people live human lives, let them all be sacred.
Korean Peninsula, submerge now for three centuries
or so, or else
stubbornly close your eyes and submerge for a whole
millennium!
Note: In the 11th century (Koryo Dynasty), 81,258
wooden printing blocks were carved, containing the canon of Buddhist scriptures,
the Tripitaka Koreana. The woodblocks are now at Haein-sa Temple. The wood for
them is said to have been seasoned by being soaked in salt water for three
years, then fresh water for three years, buried underground for three years,
then dried in open air for three years. This made the wood so strong that the
blocks have survived without rotting until today. In the social chaos of the
1950s, Ko Un once single-handed defended Haein-sa and the woodblocks from a
gang of prowling marauders. Without him, all might well have gone up in smoke.
¡®Mass games¡¯ are now mostly associated with
North Korea. In them thousands of citizens are mobilized to perform syncronized
spectacles. They symbolize the loss of freedom under dictatorship, when
mindless conformity takes the place of essential human liberties.
Tell me, cricket, what do you think you're doing
night after night, slicing through the dark?
Why don¡¯t you slice through people's sleep too,
shedding scarlet blood?
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 around 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, nothing but blood
but before and behind sleep lies asleep;
is deep sleep all there is?
Is there nothing but sleep so numb it would never notice
if you cut out its ugly liver or 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.
When one eternity's over, another eternity's on the
way.
How could today be only today?
I'm going into the mountains with dishevelled hair,
but can anyone console me for my guts left behind?
Though there¡¯s no sound of life, the heart is huge.
One winter's night, as I take to the hills
from the skies of Eurasia
with a heart vast as Eurasia
I can hear far-off waves like people's names.
Don't say that everything's in vain,
for all is genuine.
Who spreads out children's radiant tears, so they
bask in moonlight?
Awakening from an eternity of bodily sleep,
not a single crease in the sleeping waters is in
vain.
I'm taking to the hills with dishevelled hair, in
the shape of a ghost,
gazing at the empty things of this world
suspended one by one on branches of trees,
taking to the hills from which there's no exit,
and setting moon, you're
the only one to welcome me, you fierce guerilla
moon.
You, moon, and the darkness of the infinity of my
tiny worlds
that I look back on with head held high.
Note: The term here translated as "Taking to
the hills" usually refers to someone who is leaving the world to enter
Buddhist monastic life. But in this poem Ko Un is using it to refer to the act
of becoming a guerilla, a member of a group of armed ¡°partisans¡± hiding in the
hills. Such groups were found in Korea before and during the Korean War. The
references to dishevelled hair and ghostly shape are an echo of the lament of
Ch¡¯unhyang, in the sung p¡¯ansori narrative, as she lies in prison after
being tortured.
Last night I cut off an 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 ha.
Early this morning I cut off both legs
and gave them to a nearby idler.
Now I'm legless. Ha ha ha.
I wonder though:
What
the hell am I doing? Ha ha ha.
This morning I gave up 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'm nothing
but a head, nothing but a head,
nothing but a head. Ha ha ha.
A bald monk from Chogye Temple
kicks my head away.
Off I go, spinning merrily.
Another bald monk pokes at me with his head.
I soar up high
then down I fall, plunk.
World games! Global 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¡¯ll send this world off
to vanish forever into some void of outer space.
Down with Buddha!
Down with handsome, well-fed Buddha!
What's he doing up there
with that oh so casually elegant wispy mustache?
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 junk!
Phew.
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 full of cake,
with everyone living it up and living well,
in gorgeous high-class gear, with lots of goods
produced
thanks to Korean-American technology partnerships,
everyone able to live freely, withour robbing
rights,
Heaven, even!
Paradise!
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 with those fifteen hundred years rolling on
foolishly, rumbling along:
time fast asleep like stagnant water that stinks
and stinks.
Note: The ¡®fifteen hundred years¡¯ in the final
lines refers to the time Buddhism has existed in Korea.
Body and soul, let's all go
transformed into arrows!
Piercing the air,
body and soul, let's go,
with no turning back,
transfixed,
rotten 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 whole nine yards.
Body and soul, let's all go
transformed into arrows!
The air is shouting! Piercing the air
body and soul, let's go!
In dark daylight, the target rushes towards us.
Finally, as the target topples in a shower of
blood,
let's all, just once, as arrows
bleed.
Never to return! Never to return!
Hail, arrows, our nation's arrows!
Hail, warriors! Spirits of the fallen!
It was Chaedon's mother.
She'd said they'd be planting rice
out in the big paddy-field at Pangadal, so I was to
come for a 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.
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;
as they return to the house, someone living
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 enjoying themselves.
The provincial government building loomed
white in the midnight gloom,
bullet-scars erased,
seeming to ask if such things had ever really
happened.
But the sound of my rumbling guts 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 Chŏlla
Province) was the scene of some of the most violent fighting during the military
repression of the democracy movement of May 1980.
Hey-ho! Hey-ho! Argentina's a long way away!
But bore straight down and there you are!
A new world has come to Argentina, I hear.
Now, surely, isn't a so-called new world one
where all past deeds are brought to light?
They've uncovered mass graves in Argentina.
Thousands of bones have been brought to light!
Now, surely, isn't a so-called new world one
where all 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, all over the world.
What a world is this! 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 as well as sons,
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!
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 how far
our country's been polluted and defiled.
I just want to turn into a mop
and humbly wipe one spot, at least.
I mustn't forget the days when having become a mop
I wiped my prison cell.
Yes, I want to turn into a mop.
Once I am a mop
I want to wipe my whole filthy life.
Once through with wiping,
I want this 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 land.
Whenever I see a road, that means
I've found a place to hurry towards.
If I see a hamlet like Shinyŏng-ri or Nae-ri,
it tells me there is somewhere beyond for me to go.
That's how it is. It only takes a by-way
in Majŏng-ri, a simple highway in Jangho-wŏn,
and I am assured of a sleepless night.
I only have to see a road and
invariably energy comes welling up.
I must go.
I¡¯ve got to go.
Do not ask me where!
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
as far as to the northeast coast -
I must travel along every road
north and south, from end to end.
For, come what may, there is a road
that leads to one united land.
I've got to go. I must,
must go.
It's absolutely inevitable!
So just take a deep breath
and accept adversity.
But look!
A distinguished visitor deigns to visit
my tiny, north-facing cell.
Not the chief making his rounds, no.
Only a ray of sunlight, as evening falls.
A gleam no bigger than a crumpled postage stamp.
A sweetheart fit to go crazy about.
It settles there on the palm of my hand,
warms the toes of my shyly bared foot.
Then as I kneel and, undevoutly,
offer it
a 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 special cell of a military prison
is like 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.
East Sea, stretch wide your million trillion waves.
Who could ever tame your boundless ocean?
Sleep well, T'aebaek Mountain - at one with the sky
- and you, simple
folk of Yŏngdong.
Tonight is so long, without 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 simply 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
and beyond.
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.
Instead of howling unknown to anyone, return to
life
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,
each taking on new flesh in your shells, and
regaining your two
crab-eyes as well.
Go crawl anew, spouting foam like a moonlit night.
Crawl, 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, you departed, 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 could 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 up drying in daylight from
Kosŏng to Sokch¡¯o,
Chumunjin, and P¡¯yŏnghae,
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, united as
one.
Go out beyond the islands of Ullŭng-do, Tok-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 but a muttering voice, just a
wind, and nothing 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
stretching for miles alolng 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.
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 shines the light of lamps used
sparingly.
As I make my way home across the rice fields at
twilight,
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 slightly 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 more work and affection they consumed.
Demanding the hand's intervention eighty-eight
times,
isn't that a single year's farming?
In autumn, no matter how poor the rice harvest,
how big the debts,
in autumn the hearthfire poker too must be busy at
work as autumn demands.
Neither thought at all of leaving here, nor thought
of rest.
As life goes on, time isn't such a big thing to
people:
for all of us, it's the smallest thing.
On my way home, today the evening field-path is
sublimely still.
After growing tall in drought - in late monsoons -
despite mildew and blight -
after it has so silently sprouted,
what is rice to us if not an adult?
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, all one nation.
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 modest, so modest girl
in a crazy, ill-tempered world.
The 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 and Puni are common traditional names
for girls.
Spring has come,
spring's come and gone,
and yet, up here in the mountain valleys,
there's not a single flower to be seen!
Not even an everyday magnolia or cherry blossom!
Luckily, in the vegetable patch,
yellow flowers are blooming on a plant gone 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!
Even 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,
and, alas, not a flower to be seen!
Only TV antennae everywhere!
TVs everywhere!
That's right. Aboard an economy-class train
crossing the horizon of 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 breathing of silent people out in the empty
fields!
Pure bean paste! Fresh clay!
The invariably warm breath of people who know no
change,
despite the terrible times they've endured.
Here and there along the shores of Cheju Island
there are freshwater springs.
They're covered by the sea at high tide,
but at evening, with ebb tide, these springs
appear.
Underground, this water flows and flows 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 beneath the frozen earth.
Millennia of history!
This land still has its living springs.
Divided land, blasted land, trampled land:
though the skies are red with industrial smog,
and the springtime drought lasts a full two months,
though the revolution's been on for thirty years
and still unfinished,
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?
How can flowing water die!?
Yes, this land has people who fight, fighters all!
Your words are perpetually new and full of strong
assurance.
Amazingly, your words have no hypocrisy.
None of the hypocrisy of those who don't 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 fighting.
Hours of fighting 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 fights.
And since there are fighters
endlessly following one another,
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!
No one wants a gale to blow, for sure!
And yet you, white sail out there on the sea,
you yearn for a gale with all your heart:
because only in a gale
can you 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!
The efforts of both
last summer¡¯s blazing sun
and the dark of night
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 blood-chilling song.
Ecstasy without words:
my craving must revert in the end
to being a single drop of morning dew!
Every time you make a speech,
every time your eloquence
is about to overwhelm your young listeners,
I get up and get out.
Why? Because your eloquence
bears utter assurance,
and not one hair of torment?
No!
Because in your eloquence
there's 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.
For thirty-three years as a poet
I merrily defined beauty,
without hesitation, each time
declaring, "Beauty is like this." Or
"This - is a betrayal of beauty."
I went crazy
over several kinds of aesthetic theory.
But beauty
was never in any of those theories.
I was falling asleep with the lights on.
In days gone by, such fear.
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 blossom brimming full of life:
you are true beauty!
Hey! Do you realize what loneliness
a spy has to endure?
Do you realize the loneliness
in hiding yourself from everyone?
And not only in hiding from everyone;
do you realize the loneliness
in not being able to tell a soul
about the country you¡¯re engaged to serve?
Then, arrested for messages in morse-code,
condemned to death,
commuted to life imprisonment,
do you realize the long loneliness
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?
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 Ŭijŏngbu
stretched glorious, not a GI in sight!
Note: Kim Shin-muk was the mother of the dissident
pastor Mun Ik-hwan.
Stories from days of old, long long ago,
the stories I heard while early mosquitoes bit my
infant skin
in summer, as the crape-myrtle trees at Chungttŭm
blossomed in thick clusters of pink flowers ...
"Long long ago an elderly bachelor and his old
widowed mother
lived together in a village ..."
Maybe Ch'ŏlchong was king, or Kojong; no matter -
every tale was a tale beginning long long ago ....
One day when snow was swirling down,
one endless day,
though the stove had gone out and the room was icy,
Sam-man¡¯s old grandmother with her broad,
pock-marked face
told a tale of an elderly bachelor of long long
ago,
joining to it this time a tale of a spool of silk.
. .
Long long ago a boy was living in a village.
His sister was carried off by brigands but
in this emergency she unrolled a spool of silk
behind her so
he set out after her, following the thread over
hills and streams
until it dropped ten fathoms into a well.
Descending to the bottom of that well he found a
rock door
and, ah, there lay another world.
While it was midwinter in our world, peach trees
were in flower there.
He found his sister. She was due to become the
bride
of the bandit leader, the following day,
in a wedding hall hung with red and blue lanterns.
"For goodness sakes! Let's go home,
quick!"
He carried her home on his back over hills and
streams.
She became the bride of a bachelor in the next
village;
he married a moon-faced maid also from the next
village.
They ate well, lived well, survived to an age of
one hundred and eighty five. So the story went.
She was such a great story-teller, she would cast
spells on our eyes.
We kids used to glimpse the whole wide world in her
blackberry-black eyes.
When she died, it seemed she was eager to go on
telling tales,
because she died with her mouth wide open, and I¡¯ve
heard that
no matter how hard they tried to close it, it kept
falling open again.
Even on fine days,
Yong-gil's mother's pretty face was always twisted
into a scowl.
All the time she looked as if something was wrong.
If you greeted her politely in the morning,
"Have you had your breakfast yet?" she'd
fire back,
"Why?! If I haven't eaten, are you going to
feed me?'
Yet inside she was different,
soft like the inside of a clam.
If a nearby family were starving,
she'd send over some rough, dough cake, at least.
Yong-gil's mother
went to the privy one night
and got a scare from the ghost living there.
A few days later she took to her bed, sick:
sick from the fright the spirit gave her.
Hearing that she'd get better
if she bound scraps of straw from the privy to her
forehead,
she duly tied some round her head and lay there,
sick.
But a fatal disease is a fatal disease.
Her life was done, she died.
Absurdly, she died.
No need to be sad.
She died.
Yong-gil's father drank himself into a fury,
set fire to the privy,
rooted up the bowl beneath it
and filled it with clay dug from the hill behind.
When he was through,
he straddled the coffin enclosing his wife's body
and sat there all night long.
Finally, being alive and human, sleep overtook him
so he fell forward and slept on the coffin.
The next morning,
when the bier was setting out,
he stood stupidly in a corner of the yard:
"That damn woman! Heartless! She's leaving me
here all alone."
She goes out to the black alder grove
with hands still wet from washing dishes,
and cries to her heart's content until
her dead mother's face appears, star-seed sprinkled
in the sky, and stars appear.
Halmi Hill used to be ablaze with azaleas
until I was four years old.
After that, for several years running
we were reduced to grubbing out the azalea roots
and burning them to heat our rooms in winter.
Those were hard times.
When spring came,
there weren't any azaleas left to blossom.
If people were poor, it was only right
that Halmi Hill, behind our village, should also be
poor.
Still, a few azalea roots survived
and soon they at least were blooming again.
Yang-gum, a girl from our village,
climbed up to see those azaleas,
wearing a long red ribbon,
piled stones around them and built a fence,
forgot home and tasks for a while, just sat there.
"Gosh! What am I doing, still here? Goodness
gracious!"
A peddler used to visit farmhand Tae-gil's room.
On his back, he'd transport bamboo crates and
baskets from the south
to the northernmost point on the Yalu River,
to the easternmost parts of the country,
to places where it gets so cold you freeze walking,
freeze, walking, then when spring comes your feet
fall off.
That peddler roamed all across the land. In the end,
he lost all his money peddling bamboo baskets and
crates.
Seeing him reduced to abject poverty,
Tae-gil readily gave him a year of his own wages as
a loan.
"Come back and repay it this time next
year."
The peddler set out, filled with delight.
One year passed, a second, with never a whisper of
news.
"You see!? You see?!" -
everyone declared he'd let himself be robbed
but Tae-gil never turned so much as a hair,
just went on twisting cords of straw coiling higher
and higher.
Then early one winter, a year or more later,
that peddler he'd loaned the money to showed up,
bringing with him a bottle of liquor and ten dried
skate.
He produced the sum he owed from three years
before, and more,
explaining how he'd travelled and travelled and only
now got back,
and he was sorry.
Tae-gil replied: ¡®You must have had a hard time.¡¯
¡®Let's drink.¡¯
¡®You bet.¡¯
Delighted, Pok-gil downed one, hoped for another.
¡®Yes indeed, indeed, quite right!¡¯
Note: Old Korea was full of travelling peddlers,
with their goods loaded on a frame on their backs. In each town would hold a market, usually once in
five days, where they'd sell their wares.
Old Mr. Mun is the doorman at Kunsan City Hall.
He may seem to be dozing,
yet at the sound of the shoes of the mayor
or a section-chief, he's on his feet in a flash
saluting smartly.
No matter his humble social position,
there's a rule at his thatched house in
Shinch'ang-dong:
when he comes home from work
his eldest son and his eldest son¡¯s wife, and
his elder and younger grandson, all come trooping
out.
Last of all his elderly wife comes out.
Only his eldest son's wife is a bit less decorous:
she walks noisily, dragging her shoes.
Rising early at dawn, he shaves
(will he ever have white hairs on that rounded
chin?)
eats his early breakfast
and sets off for work bright and early.
The yard at City Hall is deserted
but several mice run away, exclaiming:
"Sir! Sir! Doorman! Sir! Mr. Mun Sir!"
They twitter as they run.
In the yard of that house, there's a well,
a well more than ten fathoms deep.
In Pullye's family¡¯s cozy house live
Pullye's mother, bright as a gourd-flower,
and little Pullye, a lily-flower,
just the two of them.
The mother's a widow, young,
discreet in every word,
never dousing herself with water
even in midsummer heat.
When I used to go there on errands,
if I took one sip of the blue-black water,
of the silence and the dread in that water
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
When children cry and you tell them:
"A roaring tiger will come,
a great big tiger will come
and carry you off if you cry!"
the crying will just go on,
but if you say:
"They'll take you to the Sinpung-ri police
box!"
the crying stops as if by magic.
And grown-ups too
passing the Sinpung-ri police box
with the three trays of eggs they're selling,
they feel as if they've stolen them from somewhere,
and their hearts beat two or three times faster
than normal.
One fellow who simply broke into a stride
as he went by was called in: "Hey, you!"
by a Japanese cop and given a hard time.
I had a fright going by there once too
as I was following uncle Hong-sik
on the way to sell dried pine branches down at the
wood store.
A man was coming out with a face all messed-up,
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 Chong-nam,
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, pulling at his beard.
But where the Japs were concerned, he was down on
his knees,
crawling on his knees, 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!
As we left, kicking the dew after spending a night
there,
our warm-hearted great-aunt would stand watching
as we faded into the far distance
until we were out of sight
over those wide fields.
She never once put on colored clothes,
she always wore a plain white cotton dress,
her hair combed back neatly, dressed with
castor-bean oil,
held in place with a pin of jade;
great-aunt was always graceful.
If anyone told her something a little bit sad,
from both eyes
tears would flow
silently
tears would flow.
Her face white
as a frozen chestnut,
overflowing with white happiness,
as she fills the long clothes-line
full of washing
her happiness overflows as she raises the
clothes-pole
and turns into resonant tones of a song of
happiness:
"Sea birds
fly
over
distant lands
in
the south..."
Every time the moon rose, she prayed,
and finally Wŏl-nam's mother bore a son at forty.
In her dreams before pregnancy,
she swallowed the moon.
After her son was born, Wŏl-nam's mother
would lose her mind
without fail
every time the moon rose.
Late in the evening, washing the dishes,
she would smash a bowl --
at which the moon would hide in a cloud
and the world would grow blind.
Pyŏng-hyŏn and Pyŏng-jin'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 crunchy millet 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
runs home screaming
from being punched while 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!
The sea off the west coast isn't quite a real sea.
It's more like some nearby neighbor
clearing his throat, like a neighbor's house,
like the yard of a neighbor's house
on a sultry day
where the smell of smoke lingers even after the
fire's out.
No one could ever return from such a sea.
It's been five years since Il-man's father from
Paekdang-mei
went off as a seaman thanks to people he knew.
He spent five years on boats catching shrimp and
whitebait
out near Kaeya Island.
Il-man's father used to spit on his hands
and handle rope so deftly,
a ribbon bound tightly round his head.
Now Il-man¡¯s grown up,
he¡¯s the spitting image of his father.
Il-man is Il-man's father.
Chosŏn Dynasty palace women were obliged to sleep
sitting in a curtsy.
They were obliged to sleep with hands raised
as if about to rise from a deep prostration
with both fists pressed to the forehead --
because if the king should ever appear,
just once in a lifetime,
they were obliged to rise
as they were, with opened eyes,
from a curtsy with both hands to the brow.
What kind of a rule is that?
What kind of a palace rule is that?
Palace women at the end of the Koryŏ Dynasty
were in the same situation:
if ever a king had no son,
well-featured men would be chosen,
all the court women be made pregnant
then just one of the babies would be chosen
and all the remaining fathers, mothers, and babies
put to death.
The lady Okya gave birth to a daughter that way
but managed somehow or other to survive,
and escaped from the court,
living as a simple commoner
with her husband and child,
between the Koryŏ and Chosŏn Dynasties.
Yes, people experience
stormy fates.
One in ten thousand.
One in a hundred million.
One young girl, Im-sun from Okchŏng Valley,
and one young man, Pak To-gil
from outside the West Gate,
fell in love, came together close.
One day in a hollow up by the tombs
at the very top
of Im-sun's family burial-ground
To-gil grabbed Im-sun
and in a flash they were hard at it.
Then Im-sun's dog that had followed her,
thinking its mistress was being attacked,
took a deep bite into To-gil.
When the wound on To-gil's thigh had healed
he used to boast: "Look here:
look here, what a love-bite! Look at that."
Only in the end, Im-sun,
obeying her father,
married the son of the chief of Hoihyŏn County,
while To-gil
got spliced to a stout lass from Kunsan.
The stout lass often got a hiding from To-gil.
Whenever I pay a visit to the General Store
in the Old Market at Kunsan, accompanying my dad,
I'm all excited, in high spirits for several days
after.
The General Store stocks everything from everywhere
and the couple who run it are truly well-matched.
The wife looks a bit like an ox
with her always angry, blue-rimmed eyes.
She once caught a thief who came into the store,
stunning him and knocking him down in a flash.
Sometimes her husband is so kind as to give an
extra measure
to someone asking for more, at which his wife
appears, exclaiming:
"Just look at him! From what thighs comes all
that push?"
Yet she always puts a lid on the rice-bowl
before serving her sedge-thin husband's meal.
She says:
"If I simply put rice in a bowl and served
that up to my husband,
what dignity would there be in our household?"
Yet sometimes she appears in the store
shouting at the top of her voice,
astounding people who've just struck a bargain:
"Why, if you keep beating down our prices like
that
a log will soon be a pair of chopsticks!"
She's equally sharp with the owner
of the Five Dragons Store, next door:
"You'll send us some customers today, won't
you?"
She's as familiar with him as her own husband.
They've been neighbors for dozens of years.
Naturally, the guy's already halfway to being her
husband.
During the Japanese invasions of the 1590s,
caught up within the population fleeing
and driven on and on, then separated from the
fleeing mob,
she was all alone
on the lower slopes of Hoimun Mountain in Chŏlla-do.
After a week without food, she began to
hallucinate.
With no milk in her breasts,
she mistook her baby, starving along with her,
for a boiled chicken
and began to devour
the fruit of her womb.
She gnawed at feet and legs,
devoured the trunk,
the whole bloody mess
and the baby bones,
nibbled at the baby ribs.
Finally, only the spine remained.
Next morning, she came to her senses
searched everywhere for her little child
but all she could find was a spine,
while her hands ... her hands were caked in blood.
After that, she grew insane
and roamed the world
laughing all day long.
She might well reckon this world
worth laughing at.
Pok-sun's youngest sister, Ch'ae-sun,
picked a peony at Chae-nam's house and brought it
home.
"You little wretch,what can we do with flowers
in this house?
If you're going to steal, make it a sack of rice,
at least."
Ch'ae-sun's mother, what a woman,
threw the flower down the drain
and Ch'ae-sun complained, crying
as she stretched both feet toward the yard:
"You threw the peony away."
Ch'ae-sun, always so fond of flowers,
became a bar girl near the airfield during the war
and wore lots of clothes embroidered with flowers.
Her father died collaborating with the enemy.
Her mother died too
and when Ch'ae-sun cooked rice,
it was always full of stones.
When peonies bloom and fade,
a hot wind suddenly rises.
Ch'oi Hong-gwan, our maternal grandfather,
was so tall his high hat would reach the eaves,
scraping the sparrows' nests under the roof.
He was always laughing.
If our grandmother gave someone a bite to eat,
he was always the first to rejoice.
If our grandmother ever spoke sharply to him,
he would laugh, paying scant attention to what she
said.
Once when I was small, he told me:
"Look, if you sweep the yard well
the yard will laugh.
If the yard laughs,
the fence will laugh.
Even the morning-glories
blossoming on the fence will laugh."
Chae-suk the girl 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
Chae-suk will be leaving here.
Chae-suk's heart swells in expectation.
Chae-suk, so like the darkness left
after the moon's gone down!
That venerable mother-in-law from Seoul over in
Saet'ŏ
all too naturally
made her daughter-in-law go out in spring sunlight
then made her daughter go out in autumn sunlight.
With that kind of ill will she lived to be
ninety-two.
Note: Women with any social pretensions tried to
avoid sunlight, in order to keep a pale complexion.
In early morning Pun-im carries two buckets of
water
on a yoke, her face bowed toward the ground,
Pun-im with her eyelashes so long.
Pun-im. There's no way of knowing what she's
achieving
ten fathoms deep down in her heart,
as the hem of her black skirt soaks up the dew
and below it her busy feet soak it up too.
Pun-im, who never loses a drop from her water
buckets.
In the days after King Sejong conquered the
northern frontier,
when Im P'an-gŏl the Hairy Hunter of Kaema Heights
went hunting,
he came home each time with just one beast.
He was a demon at hunting.
The wild boars smelt him with their fine noses and
fled.
Yet they knew that if they all fled,
the Hairy Hunter would get raging mad
and catch any number he could,
so the canny boars took counsel together
and one always stayed behind as prey for the
hunter.
Yet
that meant that the outcome of Hairy Im P'ang-gŏl's
hunting
had nothing to do with his skill, it was all
by courtesy of the boars.
But at last Im P'an-gŏl
fell down in some hunting ground
and all the boars of Kaema Heights came dashing out
at once:
"The moment has arrived!
The moment we've been waiting for!
You get the head,
you get an arm,
you get a thigh,
you get the trunk,
you get his balls."
They shared him out and gobbled him up,
then scattered over the snow-covered slopes.
- And that's it!
In Chammi-dong, Kunsan,
several blind people live together,
several blind people good at massage,
happy together.
If a call comes for one to go to an inn,
an older man takes a young girl along
and although they hold sticks,
it's a familiar route, even if they can't see,
for they're taking it all the time.
Their sticks barely touch the ground.
That blind man isn't her father, she's not his
daughter,
but adoptive relations amongst them are firm.
The one wearing dark glasses and
not afraid if it rains, is the daughter.
The one with eyes wide open, not seeing a thing,
leading the way, is the father.
When no one's around
they talk in low tones
and laugh: something they otherwise never do.
Amidst all the world's evil
there is this goodness too:
even darkness can be a blessing.
Less than a year old,
emerging into the world
nameless
it breathed a few times, then departed
before being inscribed in the family register.
Its mother made no lament
having no tears.
You see, it was a hungry time.
A dog came sniffing round its grave,
finally dug down into the earth,
ate the thing buried there, and went mad.
Two people got bitten by that mad dog.
Without so much as a name
that kid
came into the world
and managed to make a dog go mad.
Someone from Mijei killed the mad dog.
My second cousin Ch'am-man
is called Sŏk-t'ae in the family register
and Pyŏng-sŏk in the clan genealogy.
My second cousin Ch'am-man,
when he comes down the Chaetjŏng-ji road
carrying a long stick, an A-frame on his back,
with an awesome load of wood, a load of crestfallen
wood
it took half the day to cut and stack,
the load of wood rocks and sways to and fro
so down he comes
barely taller than a dwarf
and you wonder where his strength comes from.
Ch'am-man's stack of wood is truly awesome.
Caught among the branches there is a white bell
flower
and following that flower
comes one imprudent butterfly.
You're pretty too, and pretty awesome.
ECHO
To mountains at dusk:
What are you?
What are you are you are . . .
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.
BUSHMEN
For African bushmen
a dozen words are enough
for a whole lifetime.
Oh true Father Son and Holy Spirit. Bushmen.
BABY
Before you were born
before your dad
before your mom
your burbling
was there.
ASKING THE WAY
You blockheads who ask what Buddha is
should start asking about every sentient being
instead.
Ask about everything.
When you're hungry
ask about food.
Ask the moonlight about the way.
Find a port where lemon trees bloom
where lemon trees bloom.
ask about places to drink in the port.
Ask and ask till nothing's left to ask.
BLUE SKIES
Hey, man, cry your eyes out.
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 DRUNKARD
I've never been an individual entity.
Sixty trillion cells!
I'm a living collectivity
staggering zigzag along.
Sixty trillion cells! All drunk.
A SHOOTING STAR
Wow! You recognized me.
THE MOON
Bow taut.
Twang!
The arrow strikes
your eye.
By the pain of your darkness the moon rose.
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 OF 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.
Sea Diamond Mountain (Haegŭmgang) is the name given the eastermost part of the Diamond Mountains (Kŭmgang-san) in North Korea, where the rocky mountain drops into the East Sea. At the time the poems were written, this beautiful site could not be visited by people from South Korea, although that has since changed. The volume contains celebrations of many other beautiful places.
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.
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 Chŏlla Province and South Kyŏngsang 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. And 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.
I want to travel
to that sandbar all by itself in the stream.
Where could you find a country its equal?
"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, killed either by sickness
or during the war.
He was the only one to survive.
When I visited our native village
he'd 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,
Chong-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¡¯s home,
the marketplace next to the harbor,
the district office,
and the elementary 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
when people in this world need change.
To those ambitious enough
there must be change, casting off life lived so
far,
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.
Cloudy skies.
Don't just hang there, content to be sky!
Dip down, enamored of that boy seen at Namwon
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.
It¡¯s as if their home is the darkness
far beneath the sea off Sohŭksan Island?
How can that patch of wild lilies on Nogodan Ridge
be so alone?
Perhaps that¡¯s why the sea
is inlaid with wavy ridges
while they blossom and wither?
Note: Sohŭksan Island is the portion of South Chŏlla
Province lying farthest to the west.
Why should I bother going to Namhae
to visit Kŭmsan or Bori Hermitage?
I stop
and 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 animal kids :
What were you born for?
Note:
Well-known for their beauty,
Kŭmsan (Kŭm Mountain) and Bori Hermitage are 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.
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?
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.
What is writing, really?
One time I replied
writing is cursed.
African pygmy children emerge
from huts made of leaves
without knowing a single letter.
One time I replied
pygmy children are cursed.
Those children are cursed by their illiteracy
while I am cursed by my ten thousand books.
Ill-advised, those who think this world is nirvana.
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.
Do you think you can make it through winter
without knowing the fragrance of 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, really strange!
As I sped down the highway along the East Sea
suddenly the sound of a bell reached my ears.
Between the waves endlessly booming,
at the crack of dawn the sound of a church bell
reached my ears.
Kwŏn Chŏng-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 . . .
in today's world
maybe
your poverty would now seem paradise . . .
oh, bell rung by Kwŏn Chŏng-saeng.
Note: Kwŏn Chŏng-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.
It's not the Palace at Versailles
that's supremely beautiful, you know.
After all, where in the world can you find
anything truly corresponding
to the dark beauty
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 abandon 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.
Ah, my enemy!
Not darkness
but the sun.
The sun squeezes between us, makes it impossible
to exchange quiet chin-on-hand glances,.
After foam-like splendor comes
bedazzlement
far from sincere.
Ah, my enemy:
my awakening!
The Ch'ilsan Sea is shimmering.
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 pushed me back.
"Not you! Not you!"
What use are humans?
So far humans
have killed everything
and called that 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.
On days of heavy snow
even the animals
quietly withdraw into their homes
despite their gnawing hunger.
I stay home too.
Once there's heavy snow
our country has no need of religion.
Good gosh! How creepy our country's religion is.
I climbed Ch'ŏnwang Peak,
and as I surveyed all that lay spread out below,
the wind suddenly swept my hat off
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 on Chiri
Mountain
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
on up until I was eighteen years old
but those who betrayed the land of my birth
did not belong to just one generation,
nor were 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?
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,
rose ever higher, blinding light.
I couldn't keep my eyes open.
In the dazzling glare
I renounced party politics once and for all, and
solitude too.
Evening came.
The distant horizon appeared.
A distant horizon
inevitably makes this world more precious.
As I put on my coat, I realized :
what was soaring high,
high in the dark,
was not today
but tomorrow.
The owner of the house spoke :
"Let's go inside and play some cards."
Here's an old-fashioned poem of the kind written
before 1950,
usually entitled "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, not a sound.
It had no idea of the gratitude I was expecting.
Out at sea are flocks of seagulls
ready to peck out and swallow facile words.
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, such graceful fields.
In this life there are times 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, Kŏjin, Yangyang, Sokch¡¯o,
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 of 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 was what my heart felt
about the entire East Sea, that alone.
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.
Sunlight,
our much-traveled friend,
reaches us
from ninety-three million miles 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 sounds 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 soulmates throughout the world.
The sky isn't the only thing sublime.
For centuries now, people
have gazed upward
at the sky,
pointlessly.
Earthworms are my choice, underground.
There is such glory under this ground I stand on -
the soles of my feet are unspeakably happy!
Tomorrow at the crack of dawn,
on the frozen ground,
in the dark,
I'll be a cock and crow.
I'll tear the sky open.
Thirty years ago
that place was like a mother to me.
Boundlessly.
Like my friend's mother.
Twenty years ago
it was my mother.
"Mother,"
I used to shout
when I felt helpless,
"mother!"
Today
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?
Those grains of sand
were once mother of every man and beast?
Note: Yŏng'il Bay is on the east coast of Korea. It
shelters P¡¯ohang 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.
Greedy told me : "Become a tiger.
Turn into a tiger
and go roaring up mountain valleys."
Stingy told me : "Become a squid.
Turn into a squid
and swim across the East Sea to Ullŭng Island."
It was still broad daylight,
but Sugi with her 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 chirping cricket.
Then as we made our way home,
Greedy and Stingy,
and my pal Sugi too,
we all turned into calves
and lowed
as calves should :
Moo.
Moo.
Moo.
The old cow in Ch'ŏl-su's stable
chewing its cud, turned its head and stared.
Note: Exceptionally, we have translated the
nicknames into English equivalents when they have a specific meaning. Ullŭng
Island is the largest Korean island in the East Sea between Korea and Japan.
All the poems in the volume Songs of Tomorrow
are inspired by the hope that soon (tomorrow) the two Koreas will be reunited.
The volume was published following the signature of an agreement between North
and South Korea in 1991.
During
the rough days
tomorrow
was my only green honor,
my
only remaining source of strength –
having
to wave
my
final farewell
to
each waning day.
What
was real?
First
say this –
then
that –
then
that again.
In
the days passing
under
soaring starlight
of
countless nights,
if
love and hate,
and
the land of my fathers
are
only of today,
let
glasses remain empty,
let¡¯s
make no more toasts.
Tomorrow
–
what
a magnificent word!
What
ragged destiny!
Though
our radiant flesh
and
dictatorship
may
now be one
today
– today
borne
on the wind
already,
without
fanfare,
like
a little child, alone –
--
tomorrow!
The Yellow Sea lies due west.
People live here too, on Ŏch'ŏng Island.
The sea, glimpsed above the top of the dike
where not a single flower can be seen,
is itself one endless flower.
A woman in a lonely house
is preparing rice and side-dishes in the kitchen.
Suddenly she goes outside,
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!
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.
Sangsŏp! Sangsŏp!
Yongsŏp! Yongsun!
Your dad's coming!
A mighty voice.
Note : Ŏch'ŏng Island lies off the coast of North
Cholla Province.
One day, I realized :
my sorrows
were a sign
that our age has no spirit.
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 spirit, unknown to birds or mice.
The isolation of a spirit rising
like a kite a kid sends flying high.
I long to plunge into the breeze up there.
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 playing 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!
"Illyong-a, Samryong-a, Kuryong-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,
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.
Take a look
at people's backs.
That's what God would look like,
if God exists in this world.
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.
When you leave, its back is 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 nothing can match
red leaves no one can break away from
no matter what kind of breaks occur
between one person and another.
If we're at all human
there's always some spot we can never forget.
I discovered such a place
last summer
on Kago Island in the Western Sea, my clothes
nearly ripped in the fierce sea winds.
And in those winds a tough shrub grew,
beach verbena, with slender stalks
sending down roots as deep as its height,
standing firm.
And in those winds was the voice of a woman
who, early on in life, lost her husband at sea
but stayed there with her children,
celebrating his memorial rites every year.
No matter how strong the winds might blow,
her voice sliced through them
as she called out in a brisk voice
to her big fifteen-year-old son's tiny boat -
unsure whether, across the waves,
she was calling to her dead husband
or her son.
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 fallen word arise!
The most glorious thing
in all the world!
A windy day.
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 Kareiskis 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 Pak.
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. . .
Notes: The forced transfer of thousands of ethnic
Koreans from their ancestral home in the Maritime Province to far worse living conditions in the Mongolian
steppes is one of the many crimes of Stalin. The Russians called those Koreans
"Kareiskis." Fictional
accounts about them have been written by author Anatoli Kim.
"Arirang" is the most popular song in Korea.
It exists in dozens of different versions, each with numerous verses. It evokes
the yearning of separated lovers, one of whom sings while the other is climbing
over the Arirang pass
Leave
for somewhere unfamiliar.
Not America,
not Indonesia.
Leave
your daily routines,
your never-to-be-forgiven habits.
Leave
for the newness of words invented by infants,
the 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.
In primal birth,
leap over your rebirth :
leave.
A young poet is nearest the sun.
But have you swallowed soma?
Why are you so lacking in sorrow?
Why so lacking in immaculate despair?
Those things aren't limited to the ruins of the
1950s.
The days may be past when they were the only values
but nowadays, surely, aren't they your first steps?
In those days those things were a fool's whole
being,
nowadays they're only first steps.
Anxiety, anguish, even suffering, are sweet.
Such things will make your poetry leap,
such things will make your life
zoom
quick as an arrow shot from the bow.
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 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 on cloudy days
the sun may be veiled,
your task starts there.
Dear young poet! Here am I beneath your feet.
I and all the poets of bygone days
are the ground you trample.
Now write your poems.
Not yesterday's poems.
Not tomorrow's poems.
Write your own poems.
Note :The Rig Veda refers to priests drinking soma,
a holy elixir producing an ecstatic, heightened awareness of the timeless,
limitless, luminous nature of being.
The wind drops, the banner dies.
Who¡¯d dare call that
death?
What folly. What folly.
When sun has set,
who¡¯d dare call such darkness
death?
Once old soldiers have hobbled away,
the voices of newly arrived troops are soon
recognized
by the enemy behind the hills.
Who¡¯d dare call that death
death?
What folly.
The wind blows.
The banner comes back to life.
So go, embrace the wind.
Then you¡¯ll grow strong,
as your world comes alive.
Lash the air with the stroke of your banners.
Then go forth. The wind is
blowing. The wind is blowing.
All you banners, flap to shreds. . .
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.
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 though 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.
It must be dawn.
Have I heard dawn
heralded by a bell?
I am suddenly awake.
What¡¯s that bell
saying?
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 at mere tattered straw fences,
while it earnestly, recklessly, fills its heart
with utter greed and corruption,
heart that has never known bitterness,
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 its 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 their towering waves of times gone by.
That's what the bell is warning.
Poets, you¡¯re 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.
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 is a road.
There's a road, and along it
a host of tomorrows are coming, flawless.
Now and again, I dream.
After a pelican has flown far across the Indian
Ocean,
I dream.
Like my father back home used to dream
in the darkness when the light vanishes 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
glinting faintly
as they were buried in darkness.
Things as they are,
that's all that 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.
I dream of tomorrow.
This
earth is the tomb of experience.
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?
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.
In my youth I was quite fascinated by graves, be
they
the six hundred and eighty in Hwangdŭng Public
Cemetery,
or those of the Sarabong 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 Sarabong 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 T¡¯ongyŏng
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?
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.
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.
A windy day such as I have long loved.
"Windy!"
four-year-old Ch'aryŏng 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 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.
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 spoken so rashly.
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.
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?
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 his master
to 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 monks in the temple have good rice to eat,
so we all go to bed and sleep well-fed.
All too true.
In the yard outside, the dog's asleep.
The wind woke it briefly, but now it's asleep
again.
Note :
It is a tradition in Buddhist culture to sum up one's life, art, and
spiritual practice in a short poem while facing death.
There was a common complaint that Korean monks were
altogether too well-fed when ordinary folk were starving.
One day, this age will surely end.
Skin peels off the backs of people
making their way back home
under the scorching sun,
grass piled high on trailers.
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.
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 of me
looks good from behind.
Who can it be?
I wonder who can it be?
But I'd better not overtake them.
Today I'm truly human behind someone else.
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.
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, I'm 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.
Well before reaching Hyŏngje Peak,
among pines still moderate in size
after perhaps a century's growth,
well before reaching Hyŏngje Peak,
I sent the dog back home,
just after I passed behind Unsu Hermitage.
The dog went home alone,
I remained alone.
What have I ever done
to put an end to anyone'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
are children's hearts so innocent they don't
realize
what comes after sunset is darkness.
Perhaps it was because in this world is the joy
of dogs silently wagging 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.
I moved from Sŭngdu-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'ŏnan,
P'yŏngt¡¯aek,
Kongdo,
we've all grown old and toothless.
Well, now, just look : a kite's
caught in the branches of that jujube tree.
Such is my pastime now.
What's happening?.
In the darkness
all the forest was wide awake.
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 finest 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, deeply unaware:
you shine so very darkly!
Each leaf of every tree
casts its own shadow.
Lower down,
each leaf of every weed
casts its own proper 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
all that is
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 a timeless shadow?
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?
The wood was dark.
The child accompanying me
held my hand tight.
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.
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 . . . no
Asia . . .
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
through many other selves.
Don't cry.
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.
The title of this volume is the name of a small,
rocky island in the East Sea. Korea and Japan dispute ownership of it and in
the mid-1990s there was a very intense campaign in Korea, supporting the Korean
claim that Tokto is and always has been Korean territory. At that time, Ko Un
with many other writers took ship to Tokto to read poems and make a declaration
of support for the Korean claim.
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 both the darkness
just before dawn
and the obscurity of nightfall
the mountain showed me clearly
all I longed for,
even what lay out of sight.
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.
In my native village, two baby fawns died,
shot 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 always been gut-wrenching
Tonight, I'll bury my own little 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, and what
did 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.
My ten thousand books!
I'm throwing you all out
without so much as one last drink together.
The street's full of trash so you won't feel
lonely.
I'm throwing you out.
All my ten thousand books!
No!
No!, you protest
but between you and me
conflict's 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.
I'm on my way somewhere,
somewhere searching
for the hell of new wisdom.
I¡¯m on my way.
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!
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?
Not one rock of Sŏ-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.
If the world had no babies,
there'd be no world at all.
A one-year-old babe goes tottering
then thuds down on its bottom.
This one day really is the whole world.
If the world had no babies,
there'd be no world at all.
The baby cries in the night.
This one night really is the whole world.
If the world had no babies,
there'd be no world at all.
Growing quickly,
the baby points off into the distance.
In that point really is the whole world.
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.
Standing before a waterfall,
I forgot the noise of the waterfall.
In the noise of the waterfall
I forgot the waterfall.
When have I ever been
so intensely alone?
Standing before a waterfall today
I was more alone than for decades.
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, after unavoidable defeat
it was more than home,
more than a roar of waves,
as it rose embraced by warm sunset rays.
.
In primitive times no one reached there.
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.
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
can appear to be a naughty spirit
prancing about in a midday reverie.
A flower is floating in mid-air. Aim -
Fire! Shoot that flower down!
In notes to the Lotus Sutra it is reported that
Shakyamuni Buddha, after spending eighty years
traveling bare-footed throughout 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 night 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. According to some
schools of Buddhism, there have been numerous other Buddhas throughout time,
who've attained ultimate enlightenment ("nirvana"). 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 entitled 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. A
bodhisattva is like a saint, on the way to becoming a Buddha.
A mighty babe
threw a stone
at the sky
over the hills.
For decades it flew
over the hills,
then that stone
showered down
in an avalanche
into the East Sea
just in front of Naksan Temple.
Falling there,
blooming
like so many lotus flowers,
dazzlingly bright,
floating 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 especially sacred
in Buddhism.
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 reverence 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 buddhas,
to which people offered reverence,
before which they bowed down,
in worship of which they joined palms.
Note : In
the early centuries of Buddhism, Buddhists made no images of the Buddha.
Gandhara is the region stretching from northwest 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
King 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.
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 strong 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 fully put right.
May we all become neighbors whispering sweetly
together.
When fall comes, may brightly hued leaves provoke a
tear.
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.
A New Year's Song
for 1994
Soon the sun will rise.
I am giving 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 before 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 accomplished.
What, 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.
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 along the edges of a river,
hesitating before a long journey,
plunged in utter confusion
into the river
and went floating away
and in the course of time
full stops disappeared from my poems,
my previous salvation, like a worn-out shoe,
having 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
Even before my poems ever existed,
the momentum of the world
didn't permit so much as a single period
consequently
my period-less poems
were certain to have momentum
and so I realized the certainty of transmigration,
apart from which
all perception is illusion
Every day, my poems
flocked together and went flying up,
flocked together and settled down again,
dreaming of days when they'd be poems
by another poet
(Oh, is the azure glow of early dawn
the full range of a quite breathless moment?)
But this present day flows away
in the inexhaustible stream of days gone by
and my poems will have no periods
tomorrow, nor the day after
On Kallae Mountain near Chŏngsŏn, in Kangwŏn
Province,
high in hills thick with ancient oaks,
Chŏngam 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,
and 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 here!
Come on up!"
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: Chŏngam 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.
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, East and West, past and
present,
one after another, all went flapping up
and
away.
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,
thunderbolts falling on the blood-stained events of
history.
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 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 deep with 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 spring to my
feet
and gaze ahead.
From a corner of our country's destruction and
creation,
that struggle I must share in for long years to
come,
as snowflakes fly,
boom ... boom ... boom
I hear drum beats booming out
as the moment comes.
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 born,
is that 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,
freed now of greed and folly,
are rising,
their naked bodies haloed with golden dusk.
Nowhere in this world is home.
The modern Olympics were a hundred years old.
At the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games,
all 197 member nations were present.
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 states
that I saw for the very first time
were 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.
Setting aside the big countries,
we should talk with new love
to the little countries of the world.
We should sing with them through painful nights.
After the Atlanta Olympics we realized:
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, Ko Un, Kim Dae-Jung and hundreds more
were arrested. In this poem, Ko Un is contrasting the tacit support given to
the Korean military dictatorship by the United States and other major powers
with the disgust and condemnation expressed by the tiny island republic of the
Seychelles.
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.
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.
In the year 627, the young Chinese monk Xuan Zang
set out down a road the state forbade people to
take.
Even if it hadn't 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. He reached India and spent some 17 years there,
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 journey is of great historical significance.
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 ravenous animal.
And I was a pine tree,
lost beyond a mountain ridge
that arched like an animal's back.
Next time, I may unexpectedly be
a migratory bird on its way to distant lands
with no chance of arriving any time soon,
a migratory bird calling upon its ancestors' ghosts
to join it in flight.
I have to go to Cheju Island.
It was once home to such a host of gods -
a hundred thousand of them still the source
of the sound of its waves.
It was once 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 beneath 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, 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 previous revelation.
This isn't something 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's 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 imagine a boat whistles in Nagasaki.
The heavens, spread across the sky, above the sea,
awaken the morning here, and the night over there.
Then, disquietingly, someone appears
and sets a poem adrift on the waves.
Always one noble heart
encounters another,
without 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 floats, drifts, 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 else could make everything all one
as perfectly as a journey across the seas?
Several months later, familiar bamboo
comes back to 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!
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?
Wonder changes to smiling
as I open the tube
and find it comes from a poet in Nagasaki.
Quick! This calls for dancing, hats with long
ribbons twirling,
this exchange between poet
and poet. A celebration
here and a celebration there.
Cheju Island isn't only Cheju Island.
A poem's 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,
to write a poem,
then hurl the bamboo holding it
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
is no longer in this world.
The shamans of Cheju know full well
that whatever leaves this world
is reborn in a world not unlike the old,
just as the wind rests then rises again.
The poem's few lines were written breathlessly :
Love birth as you'd love women.
Love destruction as you'd love men.
How precious is folly
at sunset, sunset which 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.
For them the sea was paddy-fields, gardens, and
streets.
The sea was a mystery, like a code
no one could decipher; the explosion of that
mystery.
Each 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
staring 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 Eoh),
the 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 deep 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 long dead,
I have to go meet the Cheju Island shamans,
who, I realize, are being reborn all the time,
must go to be reborn as something else,
as my knowing and unknowing play hide-and-seek,
I must go 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 life as a
Buddhist monk.
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.
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,
passing most courageously.
A wind is blowing.
Now the crimson ball of the sun
touches the horizon of the Masai grasslands.
Utterly breathtaking
silence falls, summoning every mind.
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 -
what was that for?
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?
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 like that at all -
how immensely melancholy that would be.
Then, once we¡¯te standing around
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.
A few years ago, somewhere
in the Deccan Heights of India,
after I'd thrown awayeverything in my pockets -
passport, notebook, water flask,
some Indian money, and such-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
that had 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 couldn't dream of anything else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like a river
summoned 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.
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 don't last any longer,
nothing of the sort.
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 !
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 brightly beam.
Somewhere beyond the sea, in a land of the East,
everything is turning to waves, the sound of waves.
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,.
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.
Like the bare groves of late November,
free yourself
of everything under the heavens
so it can all fall asleep.
Tight-lipped pines and firs
stand alone buried in the green of their needles.
So rid yourself of everything.
All the trees together
are hardly able 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.
I climbed up a valley of Kariwang Mountain in
Chŏngsŏn,
empty-handed, as I followed the curving path.
Though it may be as honest as an eyebrow,
how useless a thing "enlightenment" is.
Without so much as a lie to offer,
the sky twanged blue,
while, below, snow piled high.
Beneath the mountains was a hushed harmony.
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 this a phantom? A single butterfly hovers,
imagined by someone's lonely heart,
and the sound of the waterfall will soon appear.
Then everything else will appear as well,
even
flowers, though it isn't even spring.
Unusual, most unusual.
That guy 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 guy 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.
Though his foreman fired him,
he completed a house
before he died –
his dream come true.
That house would stand firm for years to come.
Unusual, so unusual.
That guy 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.
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?¡± I asked.
The bill replied: ¡°Long time no see!"
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 the buddha ever bothered to
come.
Several floors above
any other night on earth
was the Tibetan night:
lengthy.
Lengthy, meaning at least ten times ten-thousand
years.
Within the fermenting darkness,
darknesses were becoming wine.
Next morning as sunshine
spread from 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 mantra
(a word or phrase repeated to sharpen concentration and align with a certain
energy). It literally means "the jewel in the lotus," with
"om" and "hum" being "seed syllables," each
representing a primal cosmic energy. The oldest and perhaps most important
mantra of Tibetan Buddhism (in Tibetan 'om mani peme hung'), it is open
to a range of levels of interpretation. For example, the jewel can represent
the mind of enlightenment which can arise in the lotus of human consciousness.
The lotus is a common symbol for Buddhism; the jewel or diamond is a symbol of
Tibetan Budhism. And the jewel and
lotus can symbolize the male and female principle (lingam and yoni); (see the
poem Mount Sumi, following).
In the Himalayan world,
a considerable number of peaks go unnoticed.
Only
peaks of 7000 meters
or 7500 meters,
have been given this name or that.
It's excellent so.
Since there are still far more peaks
without names
than have names,
this world is still radically young.
Do I have something to say?
Nothing.
The burial place was a mound of pebbles, halfway up
a mountain.
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 the heart out 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 fiercely
swept over the mountainside.
NB: According to ancient Tibetan funeral customs
still sometimes practiced today, a corpse is not buried but, rather, recycled
in the wheel of life, generously offered up for the benefit of other living
beings. The vultures are considered embodiments of angelic beings (dakinis,
"sky dancers"), and feeding them human flesh is considered a virtue
because they might otherwise capture and eat small defenseless creatures. Cremation
is reserved for those wealthy enough to afford wood fuel. Water burial is used
for the poor.
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 which case, it's best you get back home quick
and embrace the wife you left behind.
That's when it becomes the navel of the world.
That's when it becomes the core of creation.
Let the gate open, let honey flow: there
the penis is in the lotus.
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.
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.
Beneath such a vast sky
mirrors and things are useless.
Me looking at that mountain
and that mountain looking at me. Fine!
I come down from Pongjŏng Hermitage,
below Taech'ŏng Peak, with no 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.
My home in a previous life!
Kulp'o-ri near Unggi, in the north-east part of our
land.
My bygone days were all there,
all the earlier years of my life,
even my grandfather¡¯s long-past years were modestly
alive there.
No, not scattered about,
but alive, layer upon layer.
Beside the sea at Okjŏ in ancient Chosŏn times
more than a thousand years before ancient China
in the first Bronze Age
they had copper knives 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,
gleaming in the light of the sun behind clouds.
In my skull, my teeth grinned with glee, as in an
x-ray.
Bygone days, today, fine days all.
The shade beneath that old dolmen is like my
sister,
my long-lost sister.
During the 16th-century Japanese invasions,
there were many orphans.
Their fathers were dead,
and their mothers, taken prisoner, killed
themselves.
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,
extending them 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 2,000 orphanages
receiving American relief goods.
The directors embezzled whatever they could;
starving, the orphans were abused 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'd lost her own children
gathered together 250 war orphans
at Songdowŏn near Wŏnsan 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.
What a snowy winter that was.
Then, like a door
opening, spring came.
Round Kuwŏl 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 Kuwŏl Mountain
women from Ŭnyul
women from Changyŏn in the county beyond
girls from Songhwa set off along the road.
Heads wrapped in towels, they go
ten at a time, twenty,
to the orchards at Hwangju and Sariwŏn,
to nip apple blossoms.
There are too many flowers,
so they go to thin them out, leaving just a few.
As they walk along
passing through this village and that
the songs they sing
are sometimes delightful
sometimes vaguely mournful.
Once they pass the crest of the hill,
the sound of their singing fades into the distance.
Village bachelors, missing them already,
chuck stones at random, driving away
the dogs that came out chasing them.
It takes these women and girls
who come to nip the apple blossoms
three or four days
to reach the orchard.
The next group of women
arrives a few days later.
They spend the night in the women's quarters
in the villages they pass,
leaving a sheet of dried seaweed from Changyŏn in
exchange for their food
plus some dried fish from Songhwa.
At last in Sariwŏn orchard, in Hwangju orchard,
among the apple trees' pale green leaves
white apple blossoms flower in profusion.
As the women from Ŭnyul, women from Changyŏn,
girls from Songhwa, nip apple blossoms,
right across the orchard
one sings, another listens,
all the while without a pause
stretching arms, stretching eyes,
they skillfully nip the high-up flowers.
Completing their work after a few days,
on the way back home,
they discussed whether or not to visit Sŏngbul
Temple in Mount Chŏngbang.
As the saying goes,
"Let daughters-in-law work in the springtime
sun;
let your own daughters work in the autumn
sun,"
and these women's faces were deeply tanned by
spring sunshine.
They'd have to go home, of course.
Had to go home, of course.
They discussed whether or not to drop by at Bongsan
Fair
but, of course, had to go straight home.
They had babies like rabbits back home,
They had husbands like stakes, so had to go home.
When the wind blew from in front, embracing it, had
to go;
when the wind blew from behind, shouldering it, had
to go.
For the last 55 years thanks are owed
to Korea's armistice line, 600 ri long -
farmlands, whose former owners can only
lament, stamping their feet day and night,
untouched land, safe within the demilitarized zone.
A tree, trees,
weeds no one ever tries to control,
insects on weeds,
creatures, tiny creatures, microbes.
For all your sakes, may the DMZ
endure for ever.
DMZ! Expand in all directions,
spectral hopes of Northeast Asia, come, gather
here, and expand . . .
expand
. . .
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 Chongsŏn, Kangwŏn 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.
Harsh winter's over now"
His wife's tomb laughs quietly
*
Yes, some say they can recall a thousand years
and some say they've 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
*
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 door
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?
Why?!
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
*
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
*
Peace is our rice, our food. In bygone days, sacred
was the smoke rising as the evening rice boiled
in Korea's hillside village homes.
Peace is food, our staple rice or wheat or corn.
Peace is as essential to life as food.
In the ideograms of Northeast Asia, the sign for
peace
represents rice entering a mouth.
Peace begins
when every friend in the world can eat.
That means if anywhere in the world
one child starves,
one old man or woman starves,
no place's peace can be called true peace.
Peace is a flower,
beautiful as a flower.
If the world had no flowers,
we would never know what peace was, either.
If, between person and person,
village and village,
nation and nation,
no beautiful landscape is there
to offer the sight of a blossoming flower,
all that remains is despair -- peace,
that long-awaited maiden, will never come.
Peace is a child.
Pretty,
so pretty,
what in the world can equal a child?
There must be a child
for a family to come into being.
Family relationships
are based on the child --
as people turn into Mom and Dad,
Grandfather,
Auntie and Uncle,
and Granny.
Then everyone's main concern
must be to rear that child.
Otherwise,
the child is more miserable than any animal.
As a child must be raised and taught,
peace too must be reared.
Peace is a star.
So the first thing a child discovers
in the universe
is peace.
For millennia, throughout long ages of war,
humanity has experienced only brief instants of
peace where,
anyway, only desire for more war was bred.
Hence peace has always been uncertain, vulnerable.
Humanity
has always been a prisoner of war,
never free of war, always caught
between war and war.
Why, all the achievements of civilization
are instruments of war by other names.
Sometimes a fearsome voice was heard :
"Peace means downfall.
Only war brings progress."
-- transforming innate personal goodness
into violent collective madness :
woe!
Wars won, always fought in the name of justice;
wars admitted lost,
again, all fought in the name of justice :
woe!
Peace was a bird lost from sight.
As gunfire rang out, the birds all disappeared.
The century just past was all one huge war.
Behind the scenes of war, a cold war dragged on,
on and on, until finally the Cold War became
reality
and films about Agent 007 were a smash.
In those Cold War years,
war turned Korea, Vietnam,
into wastelands of rubble.
I survived among the ruins of the Korean War,
lived on as enemy-versus-enemy across the DMZ.
I had friends who became officers in Vietnam,
while the wall dividing Korea
remained all that time, a wall
that finally turned into a fence accustomed to
division.
Today, 55 years of wall and hatred have ended,
and our people are beginning life together in
peace.
Peace is a bridge.
War blows bridges up.
Only peace can rebuild them
so people once again can come and go.
Peace is political policy.
Who once said that war is politics,
the continuation of politics conducted by other
means ?
Such words can only be human illusion, a specter.
Today, peace is political,
a festival of politics,
politics as it should be.
Why should politics be the politics of conflict?
It need not be so.
This is my wish :
that more countries must join the Security Council,
and that none block discussion of any conflict.
And that this UN Permanent Mission be not only
here, in Manhattan, New York,
not just in one particular country,
not just in Switzerland, and Austria.
It has to be elsewhere too.
At the North and South Poles
along with penguins and polar bears.
And in Southwest Asia and Central Africa, too.
Nor just with a few organizations and delegations.
Yes, the UN must go to each place of conflict and
war,
hear the roar of guns,
and call for peace.
When the UN embodies living peace
in every tension between nations,
in every tension inside nations, and between
regions,
all will receive blessings from the galaxies above.
Peace is the highest policy.
Again, I wish :
the UN should be a memorial assembly, singing a
universal requiem
for the souls slain in the many massacres and wars
up till now,
a shrine where people will ever sing of peace,
sing of love
to living
humanity.
Peace is a dream.
Without dreamers
the very word "peace" would be archaic,
smelling stale and rank.
This may be a dream,
only a dream.
Today.
It will come true tomorrow.
At least half our dreams come true.
Peace is the future's companion, its own flesh and
blood.
It's happening,
happening.
All tomorrow's little peaces are happening.
Note: This poem was read by Ko Un at the Millennium World Peace Summit held
at the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York in August 2000, in the
presence of over one thousand of the world¡¯s spiritual leaders.