Chung-Woong Bae

A WILD HORSE IN THE ANDES VILLAGE
During the dry season in the Andes village
Wind of every sort and kind is howling like a ghost;
Dry grasses in all shapes and sizes twirling and rolling.
Every man takes his woman in his arms early in the evening,
turning down the wick of a can lamp.
In the village
a wild horse is flickering like a wet for low on the ground.
Starving
She looks for a place where mountain weed sways
Bringing herself up there and licks the weed;
She looks for a rock, licks and then swallows it.
She makes this happen, doing what no man has ever done before
Giving birth to a rock looking like Buddha.
For long
Licking and licking four limbs of the rock
She pricks her ears up and listens to his breath born to be wild
Born to be petrified.
Maybe it's her uterus that aches
Sometimes she cranes her long neck
Cries out, cries out in the night sky,


A BRIEF THOUGHT ON FLOWERS

Flowers do not bloom;
They in fact cough up blood from all over their bodies.
Unlike us humans, they do that in colors of red, white and yellow.
Insensitive people, not knowing the divine harmony,
say the flowers bloom and they are beautiful.
Poets drink wine near them;
Some people cruelly cut off their necks,
put them in the vase, keep smiling at them;
Some wear them in their hair;
Not knowing it’s the last kiss on one form of life, others kiss the flowers on the lips while, in and out of consciousness, their cut-off heads mourn their bodies.


SOME THOUGHTS ON A POTTED ORCHID

Someone brought
a potted orchid over to my house.
Then there may be some alien substance in the pot.
A few days later, a number of orchid's roots
all of the sudden, sprang up and came out.
They started to stretch their arms
into the air, into the air.
This is something quite unusual if I do say so myself.
Seems to my mere human eyes,
some members of the orchid family ran away from home
waving repeatedly, struggling for their lives with their handless hands.
Isn't it true that there exists someone mysterious
in the void space
that holds those hands to save them?
Even with her milk lines outside the pot,
the leaves are rather wide wearing light green.
Just as Buddha breathed his last
and thrust his two feet outside the coffin
to show to his disciples,
so maybe they are displaying their last roots of life
outside the pot this way.


Translated from Korean by Andy Kim