Why are you cloaked in blue?
Your blue wings beating softly,
you stand amid the biting cold of the snowstorm,
Covering fear with the ringing in your ears.
Silence covers the knife-sharp wind.
Why are your lips so deeply red?
Among fruit trees
dripping with juice,
Is what you shed the tear of a withered eye?
Look at the monsoon.
The rain falls only as sound,
While the dry desert makes the sound of waves.
Come and find my grave—
a grave that does not yet exist.
There, you who lie dead
dance alive, glowing red.
The heartbeat of the universe
springs from the grave
and rises into the sky.
You who sing the song of God in silence—
why are you both earth and sky?
Poet and Literary Critic Seok Yeon-gyeong was born in Miryang, Gyeongsangnam-do, Republic of Korea, in 1968. She made her literary debut as a poet in Poetry and Culture and as a literary critic in Poetry and the World in 2013. She has published five collections of poetry, including Days of the Eagle, Flash, Icebreaker, Building a Blue Wall, Tang Tang, and The Universe of the Garden. Her works of literary criticism include Variations on Ecopoetics. She has also published The Round Mirror, a collection combining temple poetry and photography; Forest Path, a collection of healing aphoristic poems; The Garden of the Universe, a selection of garden-themed poetry; Suncheon Garden Culture with Poetry, a collection of poetry, photography, and prose; and la forêt du temple d’or, a selection of her poems translated into French.
She received the Young Poet Award from the Song Su-gwon Poetry Literary Award and currently serves as the director of the Yeon-gyeong Institute for Humanities, Culture, and Arts.
