1993


색동 단풍숲을 노래하라

Sing the many-colored maple groves


A fulling-block

I still remember, mother,
how bitter your milk was.
Some said it was because of the juice you put on your nipples.
I wouldn't believe that —I thought it was all the fault
of the great scar you had below your left breast.
I sucked the bitter milk till I was nearly seven,
I don’t know why,
and as I sucked at that bitter taste with eyes tightly closed,
far beyond it came a faint trace of true milk’s taste..

When you were ten, that breast was startled –
by the shouts of the Independence Uprising;
that breast buried your husband –
after he came home sick from a Japanese labor camp;
then the Northerners came south armed to destroy,
took away your first son, made him wear an armband,
then the Southerners returned
and dragged up into the hills your rock-like first son.
He was heard of no more,
buried deep in that breast.
(There is never a Korean mother without a scar
on her breast. Every mother’s milk tastes bitter in this land.)

“Every year the day for memorial rites comes around but alas,
there’s only this spider-like last son of mine to make offerings.
The full moon in the sky is like the big hole in my heart.
Later, when I'm dead, burn my body
and scatter my ashes on the waves of the Imjin river.
It’s better to share those spoonfuls of rice among the living.”
One day, in a fit of anger or from sudden illumination,
you did away with all the ancestral offerings.
Instead, you insisted that travelling vendors stay,
women carrying baskets on their head, and for them
you boiled tasty soup of cabbage and soypaste,
stuffed their empty stomachs
with hot rice cakes big as your hand.

Now, the fulling block you used sits in my bedroom,
grayish, one corner chipped away—whenever I see it I feel
I am touching the scar on your breast.
Why was that scar so shiny, so smooth?
Whenever I see bright flesh closing a healing wound
I see you, mother, entering the full moon,
a round hole pierced in the night sky.

Once I follow you into that hole
from which moonlight comes endlessly gushing out,
there’s a sea of light—dazzling loneliness—and, beyond,
surging billows of milk, maybe, breaking in waves.
Yes, I see you, mother, marching briskly onward before me
in a thin hemp jacket, moist with sweat,
carrying on your head a large wooden bowl
full of rice cakes.
That silver pin holding your hair in a bun pierces my heart.



Note: A fulling-block is a flat block of stone on which, in older days, Korean women would beat newly washed clothes to smoothness using two short sticks. The sound came to symbolize woman’s unceasing pain, endured for the sake of their family.