Poetryzine magazine presents the selected poems by the South Korean poet Sungrye Han
Pair of snakes
Mutual queues are being eaten
As the sun goes down
It is the moment when the head moves backwards
And slowly they eat each other by the tails
Behind the impulse left deep by instinct
Unconscious latch unlocked
How hypnotized, they were from each other
They proceed at the same rate
And the pace increases as they become shorter
They swallow symbols, notions of satiety
The pair of snakes gets shorter and shorter
Gradually towards the end
They suck each other’s scarlet blood
They compete in a large circle
In pairs they take each other’s bodies for eternity
A red sun
It rushes into the sea right now.
Hometown Well
By accumulating blood, women’s bodies suffer
The Earth makes underground water circulated through its whole body
And wombs are always burning
By the fever of blood opening its own ways to be gathered
Once a month, for replacing water,
The women gather around the well
And in the middle of rice field of my hometown
Which is afraid to be focused by many eyes?
There is the well of my childhood
That has a wide open hole towards the sky
Women are pumping up water
To let their heated body cool
Sin everybody has kept in the secret, at least one
The hotness that blazed up in mind helplessly
Cold water that soaks to the bone even in the middle of summer
Hometown well where we pumped up water with a gourd
Around the well
The existences who commit crimes at the previous life
Crawly gather together
And all of them are hanging or are standing on their hands
As a shape of small stringy snakes, a huge serpent or vipers
The well side where they cooled off their body at the former life
They show up there following their blissful crimes,
Even unavoidable due to their moistened bodies
A husband who was affected by leprosy and went away to the island
A baby whose father was her husband’s brother
A woman who threw her baby into the well
A young widow with
A father of her husband who had lived alone since he was young
A moistened woman, women
The well side in my memory
Is overflowing with thousand rumors even in my dreams.
The planet conceiving a few lies
Is the devil a man who deceive someone
With a little bit of truth that a great untruth combined?
A word that is born a moment ago is lighter than a dandelion
A word that is buried waits her own resurrection on the wind path
A word that is missing threw herself a long ago
The spring has come like investigating something, but it is not the real one.
A noon that sun is blazing like midsummer
Full blooms of roses takes the season’s false pulse
As they conceive a smell of death
In the heart of the planet,
Swirling frenzied blood that is gang-raped, comes across the straits
The womb of the planet
We don’t need any sonogram
A chunk labeled as an embryo
And a boundary of water
From fish, amphibian, reptile to mammal
That evolutionary seal
That false package of gene
Today, a gunfire bursts somewhere on the planet again
I can hear the heartbeat of the planet
An Embryo born today remembers the sound.
A Dream of dying old as a white apricot flower
I had a dream
A dream of dying old under the moonlight
On a night in April when
White apricot flower bloom splendidly
Like moonlight flakes and
The sweet smell licks my heart softly, so softly
Slowly from the top of my head
Color of hair goes white
Then covered in black
And then covered in white again
When it repeats innumerably
The moon goes down again, up again, and down again.
White hair that flutters creamily in white apricot flowers
It swirls with an apricot tree as one at last
And follows an entire white background
Gaspingly in the moonlight
Then lost in the scent of licking a life
At night when moonlight flakes-like
White apricot blossoms drag my ankles
It stands there all the way
With white hair fluttering softly
A tree like white apricot flowers, like white hair
Stands there
A night of a stray cat crying
A stray cat cries. Stray cats flock together and cry. They swallow each infant's
soul and raise babies’ voices. A hungry kitten cries, steals food, fights against
rivals in love, and sex with her love. Every single act is summarized in cries.
Sadly, sadly, it sounds pitiful, pathetic and sometimes even beautiful.
There is a reason why babies suddenly cry in the middle of the night. It’s the
Struggle not to lose her soul to something, and sometimes the earth's magnetic
Field fluctuates, even the slow movement of the earth's lower mantle is exerting
forces. It's the struggle against all the forces of the world.
My mother, who is almost 90 years old, never puts mushrooms in her mouth.
She can't chew on the mushy mushrooms, saying they are like the flesh of
Babies. As a child, when she followed her grandmother to the next village, she
Used to pass by a large guardian tree of the town. And she saw the dead body
Of a baby hung on the tree dripping with rotten water. In that custom of
Southern hanging children on a tall tree, not burying on the ground so the baby
Would not be eaten by wild beasts like wolves, the fat mushrooms were said to
Have been everywhere under the guardian tree.
A flock of stray cats cries in the middle of the night. One by one, they swallow
The spirit of babies who have passed away in a hurry, and the pure soul makes
The cry of a baby that must have cried like that if she lives. The soul cries with
An old mouth that knows everything, not with a metaphor.
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