Let’s talk Tapestry
But
don’t expect anything too literal –
neither restoration nor reconstruction
I use vocabulary to maintain a link.
I want to play –
to evoke not describe,
nor illustrate
Let’s talk Tapestry
But
don’t expect anything too literal –
neither restoration nor reconstruction
I use vocabulary to maintain a link.
I want to play –
to evoke not describe,
nor illustrate
Quiet
A winter shrouded in a years‐long gap of jet‐black heaviness
On slightly withered evergreens and
On completely bare deciduous trees
A light snow falls equally
A light snow melts
Like the purity of the dripping droplets
A trace of weariness resided in an earnest face
There was a time of reconciliation
That Person Came Back but I Was Not There
I should have waited for that person then.
As a roe deer glances back when it crosses a hill,
just for a moment I should have stood and waited there,
if it were night I should have waited for dawn.
if it were winter, I should have waited for spring.
Like a bear waiting for a salmon.
A Man Who Forgot how to Love
Not earning tomorrow‘s rice, the price of rice rose like bubbles.
News of suicide bombers piled up like tax bills.
Not knowing the laundry shop, people stricken by poverty who committed suicide easily disappeared.
With so much forgetting, we forget history, forget how to kiss,
forget how to love, become workholics.
A man who forgot how to love passed by a woman who had forgotten sex.
Answering Trivial Questions
One day when I was twenty-eight years old
a man calling himself a Marxist came to ask me to join a new organization.
Near the end of the meeting, after some talking, he asked:
By the way, from which university did you graduate, comrade Song?
Smiling,I answered, high school was the end of my education.
I graduated from juvenile detention and have been a labourer ever since.
Red Ivy
A woman from the nineteenth floor who flew through the air and shattered,
is crawling up the outer wall of the apartment to meet her four-year old son.
She feels she has nearly arrived but it’s still just one and a half floors.
Everywhere she places her palms the crimson trace is vivid.
Two years ago, immediately after the incident,
they packed up and left at midnight.
I wonder if she knows that or not.
Oh, Guitar
On a trash-collecting handcart lies a wornout acoustic guitar.
This was someone’s song, in those days, words hovering nearest to a heart.
No matter what, the wheels roll on.
With every rattle, moans ooze out, hitting offbeat with no score.
A song is not salvation, not eternity.
A song is not a song, is nothing.
Dead Slow
Great love comes in dead slow
like a great ship putting into port.
Little body, please guide me.
Just as a great ship following a tugboat
surrenders the power of its whole body,
great love comes in so mild and cautious,
comes in at a speed close to death.
Diary
In the morning, I cut the scrawny, overgrown eyebrows of chrysanthemum flowers with scissors.
In the afternoon, I wrote and mailed off a postcard to the stag beetle that visited the edge of the porch last summer.
I also asked the doctor who came to mend the broken persimmon tree to repair its shade, too.
The Sea
The sea is a nomad
Wandering from land to land
Destined never to rest in pools
Or to find eternal calm.
The sea is pushed and pulled
By the moon, the wind and sun
Unseen forces that drag
Saltwater onto terra firma.
Let’s talk Tapestry But don’t expect anything too literal – neither restoration nor reconstruction I use vocabulary to maintain a link. I ...