On Cold Days

This poem is taken from the collection Ten Thousand Lives,

by the Korean poet Ko Un.

On cold days
icily cold days with hail spitting down,
loveliest in our neighborhood, Chae-sŏn's Mother
loveliest and youngest in our neighborhood,
Chae-sŏn's Mother
her tiny face
full of smiles
full or sorrows,
perhaps coming back from her parents' home
which has not so much as a fence,
carrying little Chae-sŏn on her back
with the carrying-blanket wrapped high around her
and Chae-sŏn waking from sleep in the dark inside,
borne along with the darkness,
.....
Doing laundry in deep midwinter
she plunges her frozen hands into the icy water,
the paddle beating the washing resounds,
echoing in fold after fold.

Ko Un is not well known outside Korea, despite his meetings with, and the respect he has earned from, Western poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Seamus Heaney.  At home, he is revered, known as an amazingly prolific writer and a nationalist pro-democracy activist.  A former Zen monk, once a dissolute and despairing drunkard, and now truly the people's poet of Korea, Ko Un began writing an epic masterwork, Ten Thousand Lives (Maninbo), putting into poems (poem-portraits) the faces and lives of all the people he has ever known or known of.  Ko Un conceived this work while imprisoned in the late 1970's and early 1980's for rebellion against the military dictatorships then controlling Korea.  Maninbo has been published in 20 volumes in Korean, with five more volumes intended.