Fake News
Yeon Myung-ji
I like Dr. Amir, the morning star,
Venus, where a day is longer than a year.
There are many mirrors on Venus.
A man looking into a mirror, another man wearing a baseball cap,
looking at his own face and applauding himself,
puts the fire stolen by Prometheus on his palm
and rolls it this way and that.
When a drum stands in front of a mirror, it becomes a trump,
and he is shaking the world
with a ruddy-faced statement
that he did not invent fire.
Small embers beneath the castle are tied by the wind,
burning one another,
and the days of sitting down without recognizing one another
are piling up.
A great pool forms where someone’s fear, anger, and wounds
have rolled around and exploded,
and birds rise carrying smoke in their beaks,
scribble black sentences, and disappear.
Target-setting error,
175 schoolgirls scattered,
leaving behind only their bags and shoes.
There were few who could read,
and those who read
are shuddering
and beating the trump-drums.
Young souls who lost their names
because they were deceived at the exact timing,
no one asks
why everyone follows the direction of the fire,
burning their eyes first
following smoke that belongs to no one.
Responsibility that has not been stepped on
is growing hotter,
because the outside
is always the side that is allowed to burn.
The birds swallow smoke
and tumble down to the ground.
They look only at one another’s lips,
asking who made the fire bigger,
who needed the fire until the very end.
Venus, the morning star that rotates backward,
with the sun rising in the west
and setting in the east,
Amir took the stick
and decided to break the drum
that had become a direction
not of light.
The Ark
Yeon Myung-ji
Maori warriors flattened the lands won through bloodshed
and named it the South Island.
When the giant bustard flapped its wings,
the roots of the grassland trembled even in the wind.
On New Zealand’s earthquake island, isolated at 00:02,
three white-faced cows.
This tiny island of earth, where everything collapsed leaving only just enough,
is it God’s planned ark?
Counting toward infinity, then snap, short by the number 3.
Into that very plan, God drags the three cows.
The crumbling and cracking vast land is no longer a pasture for the cattle.
Like those times, excluded from the game of hopscotch at dusk,
the abandoned herd of cows.
The cows, puzzled by the suddenly narrowed field, comfort one another.
The cows can no longer go up
nor go down; nibbling on grass, they are peaceful for now.
The cows do not know God,
yet calmly, they rub their flanks together and graze.
That silent endurance of the cows.
Every crack in the world is a tear shed by God.
Profile
I am Yeon Myung-ji, a poet from South Korea. I began my literary career in 2013 with the poetry journal . I have published the poetry collections and <Where Is the House of the Word “I’m Sorry”>, the e-book< Seventeen Marco Polo Sheep>, and the travel essay< Step by Step, Walking the Camino de Santiago>. I have received the Tolstoy Literary Award, Homi Literary Award, Cheongsong Gaekju Literary Award, Aviation Literary Award, and the Bronze Prize in Poetry at the 2025 Literature Asia Awards. My poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. I continue to write with passion, exploring life, memory, travel, and the human spirit.
