Annie Tilby/UK

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

Megumi Watanabe/Japan

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

Ahn Sang-hak/Republic of Korea

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.

Sin Hyeon-rim/Republic of Korea

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.

Song Kyung-dong/Republic of Korea

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.

Son Cecilia/Republic of Korea

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.

Park So-ran/Republic of Korea

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.

Kim Hae-ja/Republic of Korea

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.

Ahn Do-hyun/Republic of Korea

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.

Barrie Kemp/United Kingdom

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.