God employs several translators #poem #wordsmatter #blog

God employs several translators

More than kisses, letters
Alphabets of musings, mingled souls
I to writers, for writers, must watch
The scripts are for minds
Such as them, and verse

Like love built on beauty
Soon beauty dies, we have but
One small voice, one timid note of Spring
These poems be it said
Were as my own personal serenity of heaven
ii
That drip, drop, sunsets in my mind
To bathe in harmless greatness
With enlightenment, nature’s masterpieces
May your words, be thine own palace
Thy own lover’s make, repeat

These mantras that God employs
In us, we are but translators, preachers
Of the doctrine of the universe
But I do nothing upon myself
Yet I am my own celebrator
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Since you would read none of me
I will bury my freedom here
In symbols of pleasure derived
And delivered solely unto me
For myself as kisses, letters

Alphabets of song and ruin
Pleasure diversified, words not ignored
For God’s sake do not hold your tongue
But speak your part to the world’s
Brittle make, not often is a poet born

The days will break, but not thy heart
And a thousand poems be born form thy pen.

Courage to Smile #NaPoWriMo #NationalPoetryMonth

The Courage to Smile

There is a geography which holds
That life is just in our hands
You destroy yourself if you don’t know
How to laugh through

Partially-coloured hours
For I am moved by the
Multitudes of your intelligence
Of your gifted sayings and sometimes

Returning with an
Open state of mind
I come to you in my night, your day

To tell you I don’t think
I want to win anything
I think I want to die unadorned

Unknown, for ever pure and innocent
There is a freedom which states
A glass of papaya juice

And back to work
For I wear my heart in my pocket
I don’t dare go down to the sidewalk

Where labor feels dirty
You know, I might as well
Leave a tiny poem

In that brain of yours and bid you my farewell
For I’ve been writing and ate
A poem on the way here
It’s been that kind of day

But thanks, to you I’ll keep
To always embrace things, people
Earth, sky, stars and do it freely
Since mortality insures
I don’t have an appropriate
Sense of time and space.

Saved by Lit #RedLegion

Saved by Literature

Gongjooh, let’s love our craft
More than life itself
For to love something truly

You must first love life
The mere glimmers of success
In the labour, the path

ii

That was our own intimate savior
The partner who never leaves us
The thing we are most compatible with
Meant to do, haunted by, hunt for

Eun Ji, do you think we will ever find it?
There between cafes, between workshops?
Between readings, between lectures

And classes, and talking about literature
With other writers and fans
In the throngs of artists

The humans who have dug up MFAs
What’s the goal of art?
Where do words lead but inside

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This path of divine dreaming
Is taking me so far into myself
Like a meditation between the distance

The layers of who we are
For the love of what we wanted to do
A vocabulary of push-pull
A deep lyricism in the music

The drive, the ethereal passion
And violin altars, prayers at midnight
I cannot complain with this at all.

 proud member of the Red legion. It lives.

What Would The Ancients Say

Of Gods and Strangers

I dreamt of lost vocabularies
Lines of poet-monks
Dialects of the Tao
Encoded in obscure Buddhist texts
Mantras of the Rishis
Wisdom of the ancients

Sanskrit whispers of sages
I have heard them all in my imagination
Or, the forgotten dialect of heart
In modern man, whose hunger
For profit is a world-destroying greed
A few generations, so much lost!

I dreamt of slow locomotives of
Quantum physics, artificial-intelligence
A million times more intelligent
Than the collective intelligence of all humans
And all this comes to pass
Progress, industry, prosperity, technology

I saw them all, existing in a relative permanence
That was as fragile as an empire
In ancient times, each one thinking itself immortal
I dreamt of the prophecies of Mayan priests
On the scorched Earth where our descendants
Mourned, for their inheritance

Our legacy and our people, were yours
I dreamt the past and the future as one moment.

Privacy Unveiled

Privacy Unveiled

Eun Ji, remember when we
Were young? We liked to say
All that is gold does not glitter
Not all those who wander are lost?

We used to think in terms of freedom
That had the ability to feel:
So I love you without knowing how
Or when, or from where, or how lovely.

I love you simply, without problems
Of pride, like poetry
Full of sleep as you close your eyes
So intimate to the music that remains

In your heart when all words have fled
Eun Ji, remember we who could not
Remain silent, you who taught
Me so much, from so little contact

The powerful feelings of intoxicating
Mystery, to read a poem of yours
Is to hear it with your eyes
But as a nightingale, Eun Ji,

I cannot find your source
Or where you have gone
And when I feel impoverished
Socially, emotionally, materially

I remember that perhaps I’m not
A poet enough to call forth life’s riches
For the Creator, there is no poverty
Eun Ji, I have heard in your writing

The place where people can speak
Their original human mind
And there all privacy is unveiled.

Let me Count the Poets Left

Let me Count the Poets Left

You must not assume what I assume
You must not hold the sun between your eyes
You must not face the rapture alone
The waves of the future sink us
You will become obsolete
Can you endure that?

In fact, inject giraffes into your poems?
It will not be enough
As writers we skirt the issues of skirts
We duck the bullets of sense
We hide from the music of life
Yet we thrive living aloud with words

We thrive because fundamentally
We have no destination, we are the speakers
For the living, voice of our times
We relish in the fact, like contemporary
Truly bad contemporary poets
We can be the head-butting poem on Facebook
Nobody can afford to read again.

The Sealed Letters

The Sealed Letters 1

In the metrics of loving
Do they feel our thoughts?
The symbols of our inspiration
Objects of our adoration

It’s unfathomable, yes?
That we could influence
Each other from a distance
Like memories influencing the future

Spooky action at a distance
I trust, poets can time-travel
In their mysticism of monk like dedication
To the magic of language

The alchemy that reformed you
And the passion that saved us
How do I know, of course I know
We’ve had a similar experience

Horizons of semantics, paragraphs
Of being alone and jaded
Disillusionment, nihilism, heart-break
Human experiences for a tapestry

Of the brain’s inability to cope
Art becomes a refuge, a little
More interactive than religion
In the metrics of being

Do you think the algorithms
Will calculate that I understood you
Ethereally, perhaps more so
Than people on okcupid were likely to

Ha, I hope so, it would be amusing
To be informed that you were
Mentioned in some obscure corner
Maybe another country

You said we all wanted to be recognized
Absence makes the heart grow fonder
I’ve been absent for a lifetime
Your lips speak right through me.

To a Translator of Korean Poetry

To a Translator of Korean Poetry

We wanted to be writers
Cult of the amateurs and all
We wanted to witness other writers
In the social equation of

The reciprocity of our art
But we were timid, at first
Haunted by the prizes
That you won of contests

I didn’t enter, would never
Throwing ourselves out there
Invisible, pretending, unnoticeable
A snippet, a fragment, a leaf

Blowing in the virtual wind
We were like a tweet waiting to happen
And I watched the game of you
Shouting from the rooftops

About language on much smaller level
Of the ingredients for memories
That can be used as expositions
Can a soul be excited to tears?

That way time goes by without justification
And how we feel our inner child
Awake, but no longer afraid
Of the dark or the big bad dangerous world

We’ve come to call New York City
Or any other city on the planet
We wanted to be writers
It was the lifetime of bright green fingernails

Like Angels from Seoul where we migrated
3rd generation immigrants of being on fire
For doing what we love, and the backlash
Of how translation become a game

And novels became what we ate
At morning, noon, for dinner, midnight snacks.

Note: EJ Koh is featured in:
http://theculturetrip.com/north-america/articles/10-young-american-poets-changing-the-face-of-poetry/