Songs of yŏryu

There was a coldness in your flesh

As if you had been jilted by an ex-husband

Betrayed and guarded like a mother

 

I knew martyrdom was like a dress

That they wore, beneath their frisky loveliness

As flowers and candles from yesterdays

 

Unperturbed by the golden thread of the future

That’s as warm and as insatiable as the youthful heart

Free and fiery and impulsive to the sudden core

 

Where time dripped and sprayed its mischief of unity

Into the pocket books of quotes and unsaid secrets

That were festive like surprises beneath our pillows

 

That made us suffer terribly from a sweet kind of insomnia

Those were the dragon moods of a hotness in the flesh

Hae.mi, felt it just like how the flowers appear on the Earth

 

Unbuttoned with a thousand colors for everyone

Generous to the pulse of life’s irregular magnitudes

That blurred one reality and the privacy of the next

 

Like a tantrum of secret need, a nest of sparks

Cluttered beneath all the hurry and all the wonder.

The simultaneous existence as grandmothers, mothers, and daughters

I want to lift a woman from the sand

Where the sand was her bondage and perseverance

And I would be, as a man, bold and endearing

 

Holding her breath, she would wait for him

And I would be saving and saved, found and lost

I would bring Korean drama back to her source

For the good of the heart, thrill of the body

And lift her up to Nirvanic rays

 

And she would be bright as a Hae.mi of the ocean

Savage as a Hae.mi of the jungle gardens

Of Seoul, from whence she came

 

Calm with the footprints on the sand of the great loves

Where battle dreampt a human dream

Of love and fire, and sea-salt wounds

Imprinted on a heart, as fine and as tender

As the courage of dreams, and running wind.