A Movie Called War – Poetry from Korea

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Photo courtesy: Military.com

Where to film war movies

Battleground

On the set of a war movie on this planet!

Sungrye Han, a seasoned poetess from Korea, the Land of Morning Calm, shares her poetry

Sungrye Han - Korea- Sindh CourierSungrye Han from Republic of Korea (South Korea), is a poet, translator (Japanese – Korean), and adjunct professor. She majored in Japanese language and Japanese literature at Sejong University and earned her master’s degree in Japanese studies at Sejong University’s Graduate School of Policy Science. Her works have earned her the Newcomer Award of Poem and Consciousness, Korea’s the Heonanseolheon Literature Award and Japan’s Sitosozo Award, Korea’s Poetry Slam Translation Literature Award.

Her books: Book of Poetry ‘The Beauty in a Laboratory’, ‘Smiling flowers’, in Korean, ‘The Sky in the Yellowish Red Korean Skirt’, ‘Drama of the Light’ in Japanese. Historical essay ‘The Formation of the Ancient Nation in Japan and Japanese oldest anthology Manyo-shu’ and so on.

Her poems express Korean tradition, life and death, sadness, pain and anguish in surrealism, modernism and avant-garde forms.

She translated many Japanese literary works into Korean and many Korean literary works into Japanese. She translated many poems and books of Poetry. Korean textbooks used in Korean middle Schools and high schools contain 40 kinds translations of her for educational purposes. She has translated and introduced Korean and Japanese poems in literary magazines between the two countries since 1990. She is now an adjunct Professor at Sejong Cyber University in Seoul, South Korea.

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Photo courtesy: Daily Mail

A MOVIE CALLED WAR

Where to film war movies

Battleground

On the set of a war movie on this planet

War never ends

A performance of war unfolds there.

A tragedy that never ends

Scene where flesh is torn and blood splatters

A place where unknown actors risk their lives

They mainly take on the role of those who die

This movie will never win any awards

Painful death and death

Endless death

A movie called war

Will never end on this planet

Battleground

A place where young people are sacrificed to heaven

A place where young people are sacrificed to the gods

God wants young blood

It definitely is.

***

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Photo courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

ENDANGERED SPECIES, HUMANITY

If you become an adult and get lost

There are times when I feel like a child.

At that time, the stars and moon in the sky twinkle coldly like a paper mobile.

If life is a dream, we dream every day

How fortunate I am to be able to dream

 

When spring comes, living things grow one year older.

Because last winter ate up all the seasons

This winter will cause wrinkles on people’s faces and sunken cheeks.

Buds sprout and flowers bloom, but living things wither.

The Earth, which sprouted buds on the ground, rotates and revolves with a thudding motion.

The Earth also ages

Running quickly as if there wasn’t much time left

 

I am not from this planet

Sometimes I think so

My labor is in vain, my footsteps are shameful.

It’s not just me

Everyone is lost

In our own darkness, in the wilderness, in greed, in tyranny…

 

To be afraid is to surrender to fate

Instead of cowards, the brave die for them

We live in a world where we are afraid to say we are human.

Fortunately, language is the bridge that connects the moment and eternity

 

There are no cursed dreams

Like the Indians who believed that the sky was full of good and bad dreams

Drying bad dreams in the morning sunlight,

A good dream is something that paves the way for the dreamer to seep into his or her life.

***

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Image courtesy: Scientific Inquirer

CUCKOO’S NEST

Birds fly high in the sky

Cuckoos fly away with the setting sun on their backs.

Birds know best the unpredictable movements of their wings.

Birds know best about their unpredictable wing movements.

 

Every new road made by birds is a miracle

The miracle of motherly love

On that miraculous road

Even a road made of lies is still a road.

 

The cuckoo eats the eggs in another bird’s nest lays its own eggs in that spot

Birds with strong maternal love, such as flycatchers and warblers, are easily fooled.

 

Brood parasitism is a cuckoo’s survival strategy.

They were born as cuckoos and just followed their instincts.

They become brood parasitism and kill the mother bird’s eggs and babies by dropping them out of the nest.

But they don’t know what they’re doing, so they have no remorse.

A cuckoo that becomes independent after leaving the mother bird that carefully fed and raised it steals the nest of the same species as the mother bird that raised it.

 

A cuckoo born with a beautiful voice but not born with maternal love

A cuckoo who doesn’t know what evil is

 

Magpies also raise cuckoo chicks with care, thinking they are their own.

If a magpie notices the cuckoo and drops it outside, the cuckoo chick retaliates by doing all kinds of naughty things to the magpie.

 

Let’s not say that all birds flying in the sky are beautiful.

Birds play tricks with their beautiful voices

Spider cuts through weightlessness

The gods are splitting people

 

Cuckoo, a bad mother who abandoned her child in someone else’s nest

The baby cuckoo survived by hiding the truth.

Their evil deeds and deceit are the worst system God has ever created.

It is said that God created her mother on behalf of God, but there are times when you want to laugh at that motherly love.

There are times when I want to spit in the face of God who built circuits of hatred and greed in the human brain.

__________________

Received from Angela Kosta Executive Director of MIRIADE Magazine, Academic, journalist, writer, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, translator, promoter

 

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