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Writer's picturePoetryzine

Wansoo Kim: Life and other poems

Poetryzine magazine presents the selected poems by South Korean poet Wansoo Kim

A Strange Bag


He is all smiles

Humming

With only the expectation he may possess


He knows he won't be filled up

But he always opens his mouth

Just like a man exhausted with hunger.


He is proud of his possession,

But when lost or deprived,

He doesn't fall asleep or falls ill.


Laughing or weeping

With the things like the wind

That'll stay for a short time,

He opens his mouth

Just like a man exhausted with hunger.



Tears of Glacier


In the jungle of buildings

City dances in all seasons

Falling in a hot love

With air conditioners or cars

Day and night.


A woman who has kept her virginity long years

In clothes of virgin white with loft pattern

Sobs growing thin day by day

With the pain

That the disease of repressed stress bursts her heart

And tears her internal organs

Because of the hot dancing wind

That city blows with his whole body and soul


The man that doesn’t even turn his eyes on

Why the woman sobs

And what kind of serious disease she suffers from

Still today day and night

Burns his body

In flames of money and pleasure

With his blood boiling over

Due to the dancing wind.



Life


Grass

Which lives eating dreams

And disappears like dreams.


Without eating dreams,

It’ll be fallen leaves

Blooming only flowers of tears

Withering or getting sick.


But with eating dreams without stopping,

It’ll bloom a flower

To touch the bitter hearts

With its fragrance made long

By tears and scars,

Even though shaken and soaked by the storms.


The sky often whispers

Patting it on the shoulder

No flowers bloom

without being shaken or soaked.



Spell


She falls under a spell

At eight O’clock every night.


She, throwing aside her work,

Sticks at TV

Attracted by the magnet of a spell

Like a person

That the function all over the body is suspended.


Her soul,

Tuning in those of actors and actresses on TV,

Cries and laughs

like a person in another world.


On the moment,

The watch of worry and anxiety stops

And she can’t hear

What children and husband say.


After a while,

When the soap opera has finished,

Her overflowing liveliness

Disappears somewhere

As if she were a person broken under the spell

And the watch of worry and anxiety

Works again.


She, however,

Already misses

Eight o’clock the next night.





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