Ko Un

Time with Dead Poets

We are in one sector of the universe, sometimes a wilderness,

sometimes a womb.

Now each of us

is not just an individual living poet.

Here

we are also unfamiliar backcountries

made up of something different

from living poets.

No sound passes beyond the boundaries of extinction.

Our bodies sometimes feel heavy,

sometimes lighter than our hearts.

The souls of dead poets

enter and make their abode in each of our bodies,

folding their weary wings.

I am more than myself.

You are more than yourself.

We sing in the universe’s dialect,

sing in the new mother-tongue of dead poets.

We begin alone,

then we are together all the time.

When huge waves rose suddenly

only to settle back the next morning,

when the gulls emerged from hiding

after the terror,

no longer a-tremble,

and went soaring high, drawing the most refined circles,

a person died.

A poet, people whispered.

At times, a day is as long as a slowly writhing intestine;

at times, a day is as short as a newborn gull’s wings.

It’s because the dead poet’s remaining lifetime has settled

inside each of our lives born of the egg-laying myth.

In the void above high plateaux at 5000 metres

a dry, gaunt Tibetan gull is flying.

A very, very long time ago,

a continent came rushing near, collided.

Then what had been a sparkling sea

went mad and turned into the Himalayas.

The gulls lost their ocean.

They cried aloud.

They have continued their lives

through a second generation, a twelfth, even a 1302nd…

Each succeeded the next.

And the next.

Their cries at last became songs, became poems.

So each of us

is a living poet.

We are each not only a living poet;

we need to be three poets, seven poets, eleven, in this world and the world after.

We are the very sensuality

of the time in which we come and go.

When we hold a memorial for someone,

that is also the time when someone will hold a memorial for each of us.

Our meeting here

is our leaving many partings behind

in many other places, elsewhere.

*

Sunlight

I really don’t know what to do.

Let me swallow my spit,

and my unhappiness, too.

An honoured visitor is coming

to my tiny cell with its north-facing window.

It’s not the chief making his rounds,

but a gleam of sunlight for an instant late in the afternoon,

a gleam no bigger than a square of folded pasteboard.

I go crazy; it’s first love.

I hold out the palm of my hand,

warm the toes of my shy, bared feet.

Then as I prostrate myself on the floor

and bask my gaunt, unreligious face

in that scrap of sunlight, all too fleeting it slips away.

When the visitor has receded beyond the iron bars,

the room becomes several times colder and darker.

This special cell in a military prison is a photographer's darkroom.

Without sunlight I sometimes laughed like an idiot.

One day it was a coffin.

One day it was altogether the sea.

Amazing! A few have survived here.

Being alive is itself being at sea without a single sail in sight.

*

The Whisper

Rain falls.

I sit at my desk.

The desk speaks softly:

Once I was a flower, was a leaf, was a stalk.

I was a long root beneath the ground

stretching as far as yon desert oasis

A scrap of iron on the desk speaks:

I was the uvula of a stillness howling alone on moonlit nights.

The rain stops.

I go outside.

Grass, thoroughly soaked, speaks to me:

Once I was your joy and sorrow.

I was your history and songs.

Now I speak

to desk

to iron

to earth:

Once I was you, was you, was you.

Now I am you, I am you.

*

First Person Sorrowful

I am sad. Enlightenment soon becomes a contradiction.

After the revolution early last century

the Soviet poets

decided they would only say ‘We’.

They decided they would only call themselves

‘We’.

They were enchanted.

Their decision held

even when they could not go out into the streets,

even when they lingered indoors

due to heavy blizzards.

They took oaths saying ‘We …’

by themselves.

‘I’ had disappeared somewhere

deep in the looking-glass.

Mayakovsky, too, one bright sunny day, dashed out

shouting and shouting ‘We’.

He was a poet of the street.

‘I’ was not allowed anywhere.

‘I’ was wicked.

‘We’

‘We …’

That alone had incantatory power.

Little by little, a low-pressure front settled in.

Summer flowers kept being trampled.

Revolution

devoured revolution.

The air went out of every child’s ball.

Likewise the taut round atmosphere

of ‘We’

slowly went flat.

Someone boldly wrote

‘I am in love’,

but still, as long the custom,

it was read, ‘We are in love’.

Winter snows had not all melted.

Spring is always uncertain.

Late last century

the Soviet Union disappeared.

Countries dropped out of the Warsaw Pact

one after another.

Since then

poets have nothing but ‘I’.

Starting with ‘I’

they end the day with ‘I’.

There is nothing

except ‘I’.

God, too, is another name for ‘I’.

Today I bury

the ghosts of ‘We’ and ‘I’ in the endless waves of the Pacific Rim.

Who will be born?

Who will be born,

neither ‘We’ nor ‘I’?

Each wave is one wave’s grave, another wave’s womb.