It’s a heart throbbing,
tears dripping from the muzzle of a gun.
It’s
subtracting rather than adding up,
dividing rather than multiplying.
It’s
listening.
It’s
a bowl of rice.
It’s
underground roots
not having to worry about the leaves up above.
It’s
someone’s childish fluting.
It’s every kind of life,
each individual life
not subject to other lives.
It’s
the sight of harnessed oxen plowing fields in days gone by.
Alas!
oxen’s millennial yokes.
It’s
a father dying ahead of his son.
It’s
a mother tongue.
It’s
one person’s blood warming another person’s blood.
It’s
a mother for whom her baby’s crying is all.
It’s
an archipelago.
It’s a person being a human for another human being,
a person being nature for Nature.
It’s
myself being finally abolished
Ah, Peace!
Ko Un -
It's
My Lights
About Ko Un -
--Ultimately, I want to be a poem without poems and a poet
without poems, and I want to write poems without poet. I
want to belong to the poem that is before or after the
language. from Conversations with Ko Un
--One dream remains: may the fossilised butterfly
underground in some distant future be a fossilised song.
