Picture: Namsook Han
A Scrapped Boat
.
The heave and flow of the boat’s time
Has stopped, covered in scars, its aged body crying
It lies poorly clothed under a red-glowing sky
Ruminating on past time
The storms, which once shook heaven and earth
With animal roars, have gone
The wind blows uselessly against the winter-bleak beach
An unkempt figure gets wet quickly even in sunlight
As thin as the shoulder of a woman
Whose menopause has passed
Once dizzy with youthful passion
It now crumbles on the dry sand
Belowdecks, where the day’s catch once flopped
It is now dim, rain pooling like tears in its depth
Its spirit, once unyielding
Blasting through gushing waves like spouting whale
Cutting through the morning’s glow
Is now worn thin by the years
It is now a still life
Even the birds fly over
It’s unperturbed
It’s the past, cut into pieces
Rejected and vomited up by the ocean
Exhausted
With nowhere to go
Like bare ribs embedded in the sand
It has grown frail, haggard
By Poet, Soonja Kwon, born in 1958, poetry 『A Thousand Tears』 etc.
Translatey Clara Soonhee Kwon-Tatum, Ph.D and Matthew Lewis, MA.
