Afraid All Your Beauty Might Become Writing.
📖 Afraid All Your Beauty Might Become Writing_Moonji Poets’ Selection
Perhaps I love poetry because it has no periods.
Unfinished thoughts and stories.
Things that dare not be concluded because they can never truly end.
I want to write about such things.
At the end of each year, I always become calm.
On a dizzy night, I pulled out a poetry collection and read.
As expected, rereading it was wonderful all over again.
I’m grateful to every poet that exists on earth and in heaven.
I shamelessly transcribe the passages I’ve stolen.
On the Battlefield
Seo Ho-in / Prose
These are days when I’m not sure what to write as poetry. Many have said that it’s not what you write that matters, but how you write it. That may be true, but these days I roll my eyes around not knowing what to write. Frozen chicken from Brazil, a colleague who resigned, expensive tasteless food, faces exchanging perfunctory greetings, mouths eating chicken and cola… I’m not sure what to write. I only hope that by writing something — anything — a few uncomfortable sensations will sprout from the everyday that slides by without much thought, so that I can pause for a moment, like deboning a chicken. If not that, what else would keep me going? Amid imported meats, colleagues coming and going, lunches eaten yesterday and today, the tug-of-war between faces, mouths, noses, and eyes.
Ihwa-jang
Song Seung-hwan / Poem
But actually perhaps however a little tremendously barely sometimes however still then yes almost perhaps and deliberately rather in one go punctually repeatedly therefore more on the contrary however still then stealthily suddenly hopefully all of a sudden gradually day and night entirely only to the very end quite probably barely after a long time to one’s heart’s content no not at all a mere truly with every season layer by layer whole at the drop of a hat severely thoroughly with all one’s might suddenly thoroughly suddenly all at once come to think of it if that is so solely just like this with this inadvertently like a tide suddenly here surely as expected indeed looking at it easily by oneself all at once more and yet unexpectedly when it comes down to it actually unexpectedly again as expected finally like that only now too slowly slowly therefore absolutely recklessly wildly every single one without fail certainly but actually perhaps however a little tremendously barely
Present but Invisible
Shim Jae-hwi / Prose
Things that flow yet grow distant, things that are light yet slow down, things that stand silently and dry out, things that stay still yet tremble — all of these are inevitable. Yet nothing is as helpless as a body that is present but invisible. Like a small shadow entering a larger one — something that hasn’t disappeared but can’t be seen — that must be listened to carefully.
Park of Letters
Oh Byeong-ryang / Poem
June, lying in the park, gazing at the park
Lying in a room, gazing at the room
Hello, I hope you can see me in your eyes
But the dried clothes on the rack only smell of your skin
I rub soap on yesterday’s shirt
If you grip softly too hard it bounces — all tenderness
is like that
You seem like a good person, clipping toenails, a good person’s heart
is a fear like fallen nail clippings you can’t gather by hand
Father, biting back his dentures at the smell of corn sweetly steamed with sugar,
why did you get angry at my pu-pu-pu harmonica sounds when I was little?
Why did you scold me then, when now you eat so deliciously…
We stopped talking about cornbread and harmonicas
Every time your fingertips touched the clouds the sky reddened as if about to shatter, crash,
the sound of leaves colliding, as if a body with an IV stuck in it was spewing out the whole world
It rained, I napped and fought someone in my dream
If I had fur like a beast I’d throw myself into a puddle
Shaking out a wet pillow to dry, rubbing my cheek against damp clothes — afraid all your beauty
might become writing, I put the unfinished letter in the washing machine and left it for days
I was so happy to hear that you play guitar and piano
You said your dream was to play music for hurt people and heal them
You said you weren’t sure if it was possible, that your mother’s guitar had a warped neck
But you’d keep learning guitar, calm as if you’d already lived that dream
Could there be a bird that can alight on that quiet water’s surface?
On dawns when my meager discoveries could easily move an ordinary person to tears, I wrote letters in spare moments
Why are confessions in the form of letters? Under the pale shade of a tree
I find myself asking even a dog chasing its own tail in circles
I wanted to sit down and do nothing. I feel like I wouldn’t stop even if I were reborn,
Then it seemed like speaking beautifully of painful things isn’t really a good thing
There was nothing beautiful at all, yet you seemed to be seeing something
It was a park. Ah yes, and walking felt good
To me, who asked why I took the long way back, you said thank you for being curious about me
In the park I thought of the room. Lying in the room, hearing the sound of falling
Ah, there’s a person — I’d feel relieved
A stopped ball is a dead ball, is a dead ball happy stopped, before the wall of throw and catch
I became sad because I grew fond of stopped things
I actually wrote a letter saying I was glad you made me sad
To someone who won’t come alive no matter how much I pinch my cheek
I was told: what’s certain is that we should be careful about being human
Like a dead ball I wished someone would kick me
“Do not enter” — in a warning sign with a misspelled ending, we bounce up
On a basketball court with no hoops, we practiced throwing. Given a ball, it’s alive,
and never stopped trying to catch it, not knowing whose ball it was
Because you mustn’t die, if you didn’t leave life alone
it was an unbearable death
What Can Be Gazed Upon but Not Understood
Yu Gye-yeong / Prose
If I were to see sadness trying to push a person standing at a cliff’s edge, I think the poetry I’d want to write would change. I think I could stop wearing the hat called daydreaming — which I’d periodically remove to signal my sanity — stop carrying it in my left hand and going around greeting people. The act of being dazzled or enthralled by others’ misfortune and then shutting my eyelids; the act of toying with the concept of death because my youth feels too hot or precious to waste. I could drop it all. I would live well without being sick of anything, like the thigh of winter, obediently hardening with ice in its mouth. Truly believing the words “sad enough to die” rather than “hateful enough to die.” I don’t think I’ve ever comforted that kind of sadness.
Four Seasons
Lee Byeong-ryul / Prose
That there are four seasons. That we are a bit capricious, that we have many emotions, that we crumble and rebuild, that we have things to look around at or we shrink back, that we think about drinking, that we suddenly compose and sing a song, that clothes grow thicker and then thin again, that we have things to say and then organize what to say, that each has its own scent, that we possess four seasons.
Anxieties
Lee Yong-han / Poem
I hung up a smiling face and cried
Setting my wrist down in a troubled corner
suddenly I sit like a demolished materialist
The evening is kind, and April is ominous
chanting brightly
grieving with refinement
going mad, but going mad gracefully
Come in, sit down
Shall I offer my heart, or this old head of mine
Soon the first snow will fall
The flower bed will freeze white
Seasons tangled with a boy and winter
In a room where a red monkey hangs
I delete the sentence “I have been deleted”
one more time
Look, this is already the bottom
A yellow moon lodged in a half-basement window too low to jump from
One moon for sighs
One moon for father
This world was ruined by all the fathers
In short, what scares me most is that I am a father
That I, who am a father, write poems, drink water, breathe
Swallowing the small white pills
left behind by a wife who couldn’t even flee
Pulling my endlessly late self
A little more to the left, not knowing left of what
Lying on my side like an abandoned bicycle
doing my best not to fall asleep
because if I close and open my eyes, tomorrow might come
I know, it’s already dawn
that it’s a Thursday where nothing happened
Cross insomnia and you reach anxiety
Wanting to die and not wanting to live are different
enduring the blank between the two is life
If I take my medicine life will get better again
but possibility
is something that exists only beyond impossible light-years
Look, clouds that came from who knows where
fill the room
Facing the Myth of the Ship of Fools
Lee Jae-hoon / Prose
I’m suffering severely through autumn. Autumn is when restless thoughts particularly buzz about. How much am I participating in this world’s sorrow? How much am I being deceived by this world’s lies? Let’s not feel wronged. Life is like that, I think — and then this autumn makes me even more restless. There is no ship without a destination. A ship always arrives somewhere, catches something, or carries something. I want to board a ship with no destination. A damp autumn in which I want to board a meaningless ship and become transparent within the vast nature God has made.
Antagonism
Jeon Yeong-gwan / Prose
If I hadn’t had a job, I wouldn’t have been able to write poetry. Because I needed a place of exile, an excuse, to rest before the blade of self-censorship. While working, I could dodge the boulder of self-loathing that made me want to die on the spot, telling myself “this is good enough.”
Because I had a job, I could at least write poetry. Mencius said, “Without constant livelihood, there is no constant heart.” I’m not a sublime enough scholar to maintain a righteous heart without economic stability. I’m a homo-moneyicus, fretting over credit card payment dates.
Between poetry and work, which reached me first as an incurable disease? I must manage the pace well. But just as a condition relapses when treatment stops, I live repeating flare-ups and treatments. I take calls and drink tea with visitors while ignoring the sentences circling aimlessly in my mind. I work with both a work spreadsheet and a writing document open simultaneously on my computer.
I clock out from poetry every day. I must clock out. The moment I do, I must report for duty as husband, father, and son — roles assigned to me. What can I do? They’re positions I hold by default. True clocking out isn’t refusal — it’s clocking out from oneself.
A Drawer Opened Too Late
Choi Ye-seul / Prose
Lovers who fell in love built an island in the middle of a lake
Ivy covered the chimney and roof
Winter fog rises from the moss-covered chimney
The train never departed on time
With every departure and arrival uncertain
We cross the single pages of memory
Quietly Laughing or Crying
Choi Hyun-woo / Prose
Someone said they write to disappear; someone else, to not disappear. To be beautiful, to be ugly, to grow within freedom and the failure of freedom, to die, to be nothing. Into the interior of humanity, toward the exterior, holding a handful of sand in one hand and the entire universe in the other, walking straight ahead — that’s what they said too.
I bought flowers, but they got ruined on the last train I hurriedly caught. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. I came back hiding them behind me, and there was someone who smiled brightly and asked, where did you get such a pretty bouquet? Looking at that face, I wanted to stay still for a very, very long time. I couldn’t.
Something you can only encounter while standing precariously in a certain balance. Standing face to face in an instant, quietly laughing or crying — perhaps that is everything I do and everything I want to do. I know half and don’t know the other half. Only very occasionally could I be neither hope nor despair. Only then could I barely breathe.