undeterred through decades
would blaze furtively for an instant
then sink back again out of sight.
Since he’d resolved to spend his life united with the workers,
he was known to very few friends
throughout the 70s.
He never surfaced, devoting the intensity of his youth to this task.
He cared nothing for fame or distinction
or any of that, not then nor later in life.
And to his death, he chose to set aside
that other desperate self who had kept a conscious record
of all the tortures he had undergone.
Jei Jeong-gu
After the Democratic Youth Association incident
he did not turn toward groups of intellectuals.
He turned to the poor
and took as wife
one of his comrades
who lived among them.
His face was invisible among the dissidents of the 70s.
His address was a slum,
unlit,
in the darkness after the moon has set.
With that dignity and manly seriousness
a mother admires in a son-in-law,
the more he tried to be modest,
the more he was like a kimchi jar buried in the ground.
‘Try to live with contradictions.’
If you lived in the face of such contradictions, you would know:
it’s hard just being one of the common folk.
Yun Han-bong
He was fastidious through and through.
He was extreme to a fault.
That is why, even in prison,
after carefully folding up his bedding
he would wipe the cell floor
with a rag, several times.
What purity the word ‘enemy’ had
when it sprang to his lips
with no hint of eloquence.
He was fastidious even with his comrades.
He remained fastidious
when later he disappeared
in the midst of the Gwangju massacre.
and crossed the Pacific hidden in the bottom of a boat
in the darkness,
in the darkness,
and became Political Exile Number One.
Seo Gyeong-seok
His wife, Shin Hye-su, did not want him to become a pastor.
His mother wanted her son to be a pastor.
He himself so far had no thought of becoming a pastor.
He was simply the son of an admiral,
a graduate in engineering.
He was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment
for the Democratic Youth Association incident,
but he refused to appeal and became a convict.
That was his starting-point.
He hurled himself into the YH sit-in incident in 1979
that paved the way for the collapse of President Park’s Yushin regime.
Few could compete with him as an organiser.
Wherever he went
he found something to do
which never failed
to lead to yet greater things.
He had a tragic tenacity,
like the sticky sap emerging from the stump
after a large tree is felled.
A tragic tenacity…
even in his glad smile on meeting you after a long absence.
YH’s Kim Gyeong-suk
In 1970, the young labourer Jeon Tae-il died.
In 1979, the working girl Kim Gyeong-suk of YH Trading plunged to her death
from a rally on the 4th floor of the New Democratic Party building in Mapo.
By dying, one opened an age;
by dying, one closed the age.
Behind the grave of Kim Gyeong-suk stands the grave of Park Chung-hee.
Go and see.
VOLUME 13
Police Inspector Im Byeong-Hyu
From the information service at Yeongdeungpo police station
he was transferred to Gangseo police station as soon as it opened,
to the No. 2 intelligence section there,
and throughout the Seventies
his job was to accompany one poet everywhere.
The pomade he used
to slick down
his thick hair
smelt disgusting at first
but his companion got used to it.
Whenever that poet went to preside at a wedding
he went along too.
When the poet went to a bar
he’d sit over on the far side
with a glass.
Then,
if the poet went to the bathhouse
after a night’s drinking,
he’d go along too,
get into the hot tub naked with him,
and learned to switch between hot and cold tubs.
When the poet went to lecture in Busan, Gwangju, Daegu,
he went along.
When orders came from above,
he’d deploy a combat police unit to keep the poet from leaving home.
A bright-eyed, trustworthy man,
he often wore a blue shirt.
He was reliable but had problems with his wife,
who had no luck with horoscopes and was always quarrelling.
Then, when that poet went to prison,
he deposited the poet’s meagre royalties in the bank.
First Love
The full moon rose
over a hillside slum in Bongcheon-dong, southern Seoul.
A young man was climbing the steep path
around 11.30 p.m.
after working overtime.
His name was Yun Sang-gon, he had grown up well,
though knowing nothing of father or mother.
At the top of the steep path
someone was waiting for him in an alleyway, freezing cold.
Her name was Kim Sun-ja.
The full moon was high in the sky.
In a world abounding with the sound of moonlight,
how could poverty be all there was?
Twenty-year-old Sang-gon’s tough hand
seized seventeen-year-old Sun-ja’s coarsened hand.
Sun-ja had no smell of face-powder.
There was nothing like, ‘I love you’.
The young man trembled as he spoke:
‘Let’s not change.’
Choking, the girl nodded.
She bit her lips in confusion and blood gathered in her mouth.
Won Byeong-o’s DMZ
The 38th parallel cut the Korean peninsula in two
from the summer of 1945.
Once again
after the summer of 1950
the DMZ divided the Korean peninsula
with guns aimed across at each other since 1953.
One hundred and sixty miles of barbed wire.
Father in the North,
and son in the South were both experts on birds.
The son in the south tied his name
to a bird’s leg and set it loose.
A few years later
the father in the north
set loose a bird carrying his name.
No message.
Had there been a message
it would have been a crime against national security
under the South’s anti-communist laws,
and a crime under the North’s criminal laws.
Each merely attached his name to a bird,
set it free,
sent it back.
That southern son was Won Byeong-o, a professor at Kyunghee University.