For the Sake of Spring

By Lee You Kyung

Translated by Rodney E. Tyson & Hong Eun-Taek

The Quarterly Review: Poetry & Criticism, 4(2), p. 207. Summer 2001.

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All living things left this vegetable patch.
In order to return on a spring day and to become spring
Even the past white shadows of the skins of radishes and cabbages
Went inside Mother Earth,
Nestled in her arms like unborn children,
And worms swept away with the garbage
Were tortured with wild dreams and forgot the world.

Days like sewer water under ice flow by.
A country farmhouse bending over and eager to go down the mountain
Stirs up dust and falls down,
And for the sake of spring, blind seeds in the loft
Conspire to become leaves today, too.
Over there, a man that looks like a beggar
Slips again and again on the frozen stream.

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The Quarterly Review: Poetry & Criticism | Curriculum Vitae