in Bear Forest
Eon-nyeon had
two younger brothers
and two younger sisters
The family had grown as they journeyed on.
They’re not yet called Sergei or Josip or Boris but
First Twin
Second Twin
Dong-seop
Geut-seop
Below Eon-nyeon
Little Girl
Last Girl
Once she turned eight Eon-nyeon became an adult.
She had been living the days
she was destined to live.
Seong-jin
The Japanese imposed the solar calendar on the Korean people.
They abolished the first Korean festival,
the first day of the first lunar month,
Lunar New Year –
New Year ancestral offerings they abolished too.
January 1, solar new year, was the Japanese New Year.
Unknown to the authorities
we celebrated our own New Year.
Lunar New Year was our Independence Movement.
Broiled beef
fried flat cakes
cinnamon punch afloat with thin flakes of ice
boiled rice
steamed fish
Wearing new clothes we went round paying our respects.
But Seong-jin’s family in their grass hut outside the village
kept neither the Korean New Year
nor the Japanese New Year.
You would find there no bright party clothes,
no rice cakes.
Unearthing the root of an arrowroot vine
from the sunny side of some hill
Seong-Jin would chew hard on the root
for sudden new energy.
On a New Year’s morning
his prick stood erect in vain.
In June that year the war began.
One month later, when the People’s Army was in charge for three months,
he served as illiterate chairman for the Democratic Young People’s Front
after which he went missing, permanently.
Hallelujah
Outside Ganghwa town on Ganghwa Island
there’s Gapgot Point, a place where breezes blow.
In the fields of Gapgot,
once the distinctive February wind drops off,
the March wind comes along.
Skylarks venturing upward are hurt by the wind.
Across the whirlwind-stirred sea,
in the haze of the Gimpo plains
the April wind urges young rice seed-beds to sprout.
The seedlings are planted out in May.
As people plant the rice, they shout:
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Once Christianity arrived at isolated villages
believers
and non-believers
became deadly foes.
In a single village
Baptists and Episcopalians
each the others’ foes
could not intermarry
or attend each others’ wedding parties.
A member of the Holiness Church, Gwak Il-gyu,
who shouts Hallelujah a hundred times a day,
is getting married to Hong Sun-ja of the same church,
who shouts Hallelujah two hundred times a day.
Episcopalians dare not attend
the wedding.
Even if they’re cousins
or distant relatives.
Former co-workers,
former close friends and kin
vanished,
became one another’s foes.
The moment the North Korea armies arrived
those on the left arose and killed those of the right.
Once the North withdrew
the right was left
having slaughtered all those of the left.
The churches prospered.
The churches distributed
American relief food and goods.
People came flocking
to collect wheat flour.
They even received a second-hand suit of clothes.
All were forced to shout Hallelujah!
Out in the fields at harvest time too:
Hallelujah!
Hallelujah!
Ji Ha-ryeon
At the height of Japanese rule the blue sky begot despair.
She was a poet’s wife,
a poet’s comrade.
From the very start her belated love
was heading for open-eyed darkness.
When she published her short story ‘Farewell’ in the review Munjang
in 1940, in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War
and just before the Pacific War,
colonised Korea
was proud of its camellia-like woman writer,
Ji Ha-ryeon.
She was Masan’s drunken spirit,
the desire of the night sea in Masan Bay.
Lovely Ji Ha-ryeon fell in love with handsome Im Hwa’s tuberculosis.
She made a secret conversion.
Poet Im Hwa’s original name was Yi Hyeon-uk.
They had the happiest times after Liberation.
Her husband,
putting on light linen clothes,
invited Kim Sun-nam
and Ham Se-deok to dinner,
a meal which his wife in her apron prepared to perfection.
They joined the underground,
went North.
Just after the war, the poet was executed,
the poet’s wife
was thrown into an asylum.
She spent days of despair, raving and fainting,
then died like trash.
Ideology, that was their dream.
Ideology, that was their death.
Ji Ha-ryeon.
Literature, revolution, love
beneath skies that spout blue blood.
Lieutenant Bak Baek
Lieutenant Bak Baek,
adjutant of the search company, 2nd battalion, 16th regiment, 8th division.
He advanced as far as Chosan
on the banks of the Yalu River. He was very much moved, impassioned.
It was early winter, 1950.
He gazed across the river
at Manchuria, Chinese land.
They encountered the Communist Chinese army.
His body turned into a hedgehog.
On a hill
between Huicheon and Gujang
he was taken prisoner by the Chinese army.
The company commander was killed in action,
two soldiers were killed, three injured,
and the remaining thirty taken prisoner.
The POW camp at Gwansan in Hwapung
held five hundred South Korean soldiers
and three hundred American soldiers.
In the bitter winter prisoners kept dying.
In the camp
each room held twenty men, no space to lie down.
If one died,
the rest had a little more space.
Keeping prisoners’ corpses
for two or three days in the room,
leaning them against the wall
at roll-call,
the rest shared the rations of the dead.
They were given one handful of corn twice a day.
In one day fifty or so died.
One cupful of lice came crawling
from every corpse.
Some died gnawing icicles.
Numb from frostbite,
they felt no pain when a finger was cut off.
Lieutenant Bak Baek did not die. He came back in an exchange of prisoners.
Bracken in Namdaemun’s Dokkaebi Market
Goods from the PX on the American base at Yongsan are loaded onto a truck.
Kim Cheol-su, a Korean,
and Harry, a black American,
are expert thieves.
They pass the checkpoint at the back gate