on air-raid-free evenings
in the City Hall Plaza,
where pools or rainwater formed in bomb craters.
Henceforth, the heroic People’s Army
will never again make a strategic withdrawal,
and so on.
And during those rallies
here and there around the Plaza,
rice-cake,
noodles,
makgeolli were being sold.
After Seoul was first recaptured
Yi Jang-don’s wife,
a strong woman,
sold rice-cakes in the Republic of Korea;
after the retreat
she sold rice-cakes again in the People’s Republic.
Sure enough, in 1953, after Seoul was secured,
she made her way into Nagwon-dong, Seoul
and opened the Obok rice-cake store.
A woman
who always wrapped her head in a towel.
A woman
who never so much as blinked during air-raids.
A woman
who knew nothing of fear, or of anxiety.
A Birth
On the night of January 3, 1951,
flames rose high
all over Seouclass="underline"
flames from burning military supplies,
flames from burning food stocks,
flames from burning documents.
On the morning of January 4,
low-flying aircraft
made an announcement from loudspeakers:
Citizens who have not yet evacuated
should do nothing rash.
Take care.
There was nobody left to hear it.
Seoul was just about deserted.
Maybe sixty thousand remained.
Flocks of crows, an uncommon sight,
had free run of Seoul
At dawn that day,
a baby
had just been born,
one of the sixty thousand.
As day was breaking,
communist soldiers in fur hats
marched through the streets.
The baby
was crying.
The mother with almost no milk
was holding her fatherless newborn.
It was a birth at which none rejoiced,
but nobody said it was a birth
that should not have happened.
The mother will grow strong.
The baby too will grow stronger, little by little.
VOLUME 20
The Present
Our lovely land of rivers, mountains!
Ah, did we have such hatred that we took revenge?
Did we have such resentment that we took revenge
and again revenge?
Since Liberation, Korea has been a land of blood.
Every single nook and cranny of our whole peninsula
has become a cursed place
where one is forced to kill another.
Ended now a thousand years of warm hearts in every village.
After 1945
suddenly
Jeong-tae turned from a boy into a young men.
You too
are no longer yourself
but your enemy’s enemy.
You there, America’s enemy? The USSR’s enemy?
What country are you a descendant of?
When Jeong-tae had been drinking
he longed to see his right-wing father
then if he drank more
he longed to see his left-wing maternal uncle.
The people who’d loved him
when he was a child.
Seven-year-old Nam-ok
In a roadside shack in Osan
lived a brother and sister whose parents had been killed.
The brother was fifteen, and
— the child below him having died –
then came Nam-ok, seven.
Her brother had gone along the railway lines collecting coals;
she was all alone,
having fun playing marbles.
Their land’s sky was completely occupied by American planes.
No Cheon-myeong
‘The deer,
a pathetic animal on account of its long neck.’
The woman who wrote that poem,
had a pointed chin,
wore traditional Korean skirt and jacket,
the skirt short, the jacket-ribbons long.
On June 24, 1950,
she was invited for a convivial supper
at the house of the older poet Mo Yun-suk,
who afterward accompanied her home in a jeep.
After the war broke out on June 25,
Mo Yun-suk hid on Aegi Hill behind Ewha Womans University.
She sent someone to No Cheon-myeong to ask for some food
and two summer jackets.
That woman,
far from sending summer jackets, demanded:
Tell me where Mo Yun-suk is.
If you don’t
I’ll hand you over to the security forces.
Soon loudspeakers echoed over Aegi Hilclass="underline"
The reactionary Mo Yun-suk is hiding on this mountain.
Report her on sight.
In an extreme situation people have to betray even friends and colleagues.
In an extreme situation even lyric poets
become cold-blooded enemies.
In an extreme situation a delicate spinster
becomes a cruel witch.
In an extreme situation a simple rural emotion becomes an evil ideology.
When Seoul was recaptured, No Cheon-myeong was sentenced to death.
That was commuted to a life sentence,
then reduced to twenty years,
and soon
she was released on bail after writers sent in a petition.
Dressed in a white jacket and black skirt, No Cheon-myeong
turned up at a meeting of woman-writers in ruined Myeong-dong.
A Chance Encounter
Allied search teams were in full swing.
Enemy search teams also.
Somewhere near Palgong Mountain
Jeong Hae-bong,
a member of the twelfth regiment’s search team,
encountered Jeong Hae-seon, from the enemy search team.
They stood there, ten yards apart,
aiming rifles at each other.
Then one exclaimed:
‘Brother!’
The other replied:
‘Is that you, Hae-seon?’
They fell into each other’s arms.
The elder was twenty,
the younger eighteen.
Jeong Hae-seon joined the Southern search unit.
The two brothers, Jeong Hae-bong
and Jeong Hae-seon
both ate a lot of rice.
Rice was their hometown, their parents..
Eon-nyeon in Siberia
In the 1920s
some Koreans
made their way beyond Mongolia
into Russia,
journeyed all the way to near Lake Baikal
and settled in a ruined hut kept standing by props.
Such a long way to go to live.
Despite blizzards
and days so cold their urine froze,
they managed
not to freeze to death.
So harsh a way to live.
One freezing morning
a girl in Korean dress, long skirt and blouse,
a water pot on her head
went to fetch water
carrying a club to smash the ice
Not yet called Anna or Tatiana,
just Eon-nyeon, Pretty Girl.
Her father had not come back home for several days.
Boarding a sledge,
he went off to a hunting-lodge