Two Poems By Yeon Myung-ji-Korea

Seventeen-Year-Old Miss Marco Polo Sheep

By Yeon Myung-ji

Miss Marco Polo Sheep of the Pamir Mountains loved almond blossoms

and was an aspiring singer

who sang along to K-POP.

An aspirant,

what a beautiful occupation.

Riding the rhythm on the breath of the wind,

an aspirant walking the grassland.

She loves the wild goat

that endured the winter, tightly chewing on festuca grass.

The beasts of winter

must be winter aspirants.

The ghost of the snow mountains, the snow leopard,

must be a snow aspirant.

When you lie face down on the grassland, the grass sways,

and when you flip over the back of a stone, fish swim—

the aspirants of nature.

Only when a river flows from the belly

does the voice break through, says Miss Marco Polo Sheep.

Even if bitten on the nape and blood flows,

the song of the idol goat cannot be given up.

The pop song, which claimed that when the snow melts,

the leopard would melt too,

was plagiarism anyway.

The moonlight darkens,

and the snow leopard of Pamir, a high and desolate land,

drags its long tail across the ridge—

the ghost of the alpine.

The aspirant of a fairy tale,

caught off guard by the seventeen-year-old Miss Marco Polo Sheep.

The Name Stained on My Hands

Yeon Myung-ji

After my mother passed away,
I applied for her life insurance benefits.
On the policy my younger sibling brought,
a single camellia bloomed—
beside my mother’s name
its red had bled like flower dye.
I rubbed it with my finger.
The red April that had passed
lifted as a lone petal, unfinished,
and one name smudged
onto the tip of my finger.
In the space marked “Beneficiary,”
I pressed down my own name.
Fresh with blood-warm life,
it swelled past the round seal’s edge,
like overlapping blossoms,
and sank between two folded lives.
Slowly, I wiped
the name from my hands with tissue.
Mother must have used her aching name
for a very long time.
Believing each place to be spring,
she pressed it down again and again before she left.
Now, like belated news of flowers,
her name keeps flying toward me
from here and there.
With the warmth of the name she stamped behind,
I must endure a spring that feels like midwinter.
But why did she leave red flowers
at the edge of every precipice?
Beneath my feet is such vast emptiness
that some petals seem as if
it will take years before they touch the ground.
Spring days are passing—
and like the pale pink skirt she loved to sing about,
the wind blows again.