At last,
I devised someone to talk to.
When I cried,
“Is anyone there?”
I created a voice
that no one could hear—
a voice heard only by myself.
Outside my ears,
that voice cannot be heard.
When I am an island,
when seagulls, weary from flight,
gather upon it,
a sinking ear,
like an oak leaf,
reaches of its own accord
toward the abyss—
and from that immeasurable depth
comes the voice of being.
Even if
it has grown from the trunk
of my own body,
that thing
springing from startled earth,
I called Jiseul.
Then I am
a mountain in flames,
the pouring rain,
the wind sweeping across the forest,
the water overflowing through the valley.
At last,
I came to possess a self
that speaks with my solitude.
From where do my prophecies come?
From where does my tongue arise?
At last,
I came to possess poetry—
the poetry that transforms
my monologue,
which becomes a prison
and a cold star,
into dialogue.
That thing unearthed
from a mound of earth,
I called Jiseul.
*Jiseul: a Jeju dialect word meaning “potato.”
Forest
You never come out to meet me. Nor do you turn your back on me or run away. You do not judge or analyze my shadows.
You remain yourself, and I remain myself, each of us forming a forest of thoughts. Even when I walk immersed in the sound of rain, or along a path covered with fallen leaves, you never tell me that someone who once walked that road still lives within me.
Following the vine-covered trails, I come to see that the whole wind-blown world is bent and bowing.
Ah, is it because of an unanswered question, standing like the posture of countless trees, that the tall trees perish? Is that why, leaning on you for so long, I too end up weeping like a bird caught and struggling in the branches of a shrub?
You arrive leading countless schools of fish. Whoosh, whoosh—with the sound of waves shifting the boundaries of the equator, you overturn a sea glittering with ripples of light. At such moments, I become an island imprisoned by sound.
A weary desert walks away with its back turned to you. Confronted by a shabby thought I happen to stumble upon, I suddenly become afraid.
Beyond knowing that there are paths that exist by themselves and roads that are made of their own accord, I know nothing of your expressions or emotions. I do not know the way that leads to you.
“Hello?” A passerby approaching from the opposite direction extends a hand. Like the island crape myrtle opening its mouth and ears, we open ourselves and become each other’s trees. Loneliness, after all, is not the same as living alone.
The sun was setting, and I had stood for a long time in the pouring darkness. Then there you were, in full bloom with white flowers.
You savor my mortal body, and I devote myself to your silence. You are my new religion. A pale-green sanctuary begins to sway beneath the sky.
