Excerpt from the book Three Poets of Modern Korea

From the Introduction

Pusan, South Korea. The D.J. on the taxi's radio shouts, "Yi Sang is the greatest poet of the twentieth century!" Apparently, we are tuned in to a show dedicated to pop songs derived from transpositions of Korean poems ranging from modern to ancient, demotic to hermetic, celebratory to elegaic. This should come as no surprise in a country where poems are found on mountain boulders, on café walls, on placemats, T shirts, and television game shows, a country in which every candidate for civil service had to pass an exam establishing proficiency as a poet, a one thousand-year-old requirement only relaxed in the past one hundred years.

"Poem No. 11" by Yi Sang

This porcelain cup resembles my skull. When I take the cup in my hand, an arm like a branch grafted on sprouts from my arm, it's fresh hand clutches the porcelain cup and tosses it over my shoulder to the floor. Because my arm defends the porcelain cup to the death, the broken bits of cup are, of course, my own skull that resembles the porcelain cup. If my arm had so much as flinched before the branching arm twisted snake-like back into my body, the white paper holding off the flood would have been ripped. But, as ever, my arm defends the porcelain cup to the final breath.

"Island" by Hahm Dong-seon

After setting out toward the east this morning
I walk back to the gloam of the western sea.
Beneath the first stars the boat lights come on
One by one like a woman's most faithful regrets.
The village behind the stonewall and tree-line
Looms up with one step, draws back with another.
Will the unmistakable smell of bean-paste stew
That has haunted this road's entrance for years
Be the last thing I take into account today?
Memories are ephemeral, hard to see.
Soon they're the same as the summer that poisons the oleanders,
The slow breaking branches of lust.

"Dead Leaf and Child" by Choi Young-mi

Somewhere
a leaf is shaking on its branch.

A leaf is plucked by the wind and falls
that it might shine and be taken as a cold metaphor in the midst of someone's excavation,
that it might announce the secrets of the great sun and of the earth
that worked it into place,
that it might be exhibited as the open remains of the season.

Somewhere a leaf is pulled by the wind and descends
to the ground after much resistance,
and somewhere is a child who stops crying long enough to pick up
that sudden toy of nature.

Somewhere the tip-end of a dead leaf points to the sky,
to the reason things let go mid-way through the long last breath.