Easter Sunday

Bacteria and viruses

have become the most terrifying god, finally.

For the reason that they are invisible

for the reason that people have fallen dead everywhere they pass by,

for the reason the power shows that humans are like chaff blown by the wind.

There is no evidence that bacteria and viruses have hearts,

but these oldest beings, especially intelligent,

learned the secret of being immortal quite early on.

To get something, you have to throw something away.

What we have given up is independence.

Instead, we can dwell on any creature.

We became omnipresent in the world.

That’s how the history of the Billionaire Dynasty began.

At every alley they might have crossed,

white tents set up, people lined up with their mouths open,

several times a day, they washed their hands and mumbled

It's gonna be okay, gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay, nothing will happen.

Chapels all closed at once,

all day long, watching the disaster news live on the black TV

more intently than the sermon, we spent the Sabbath.

Drive-through confessions,

as we were sitting in the car, God seemed to pass by for a second.

This Easter,

no one was resurrected.

Easter eggs were painted with masked faces,

Layers of dust piled up in the house instead of a virus.

When we opened the window, the dust flew up for a second and settled down

like the ashen wings of an angel

visible, invisible, faintly, foggy enough though.

Easter Sunday

(Munhakdongne, 2021)

Birds of the Pleistocene

The giant dinosaurs are all gone, but

Fish, birds, and humans survived, how?

A bird that has lost its feathers

Why does its beak get sharper and sharper?

How much more pointed will conifers be?

Why do thorns begin to sprout on dry branches?

Why do birds cry at dawn?

What does darkness try to bring by crying?

Who has swallowed the sun?

Where are the plastics or drifts accumulated?

When does the new ice age end?

Why are there just ice floes?

Where are the crow and the thrush?

Where did the hydras come from?

If one of the heads is cut off,

Do two heads really sprout?

How much blood flew from the severed head?

How much blood ran down the drain?

Why is the evidence of slaughter fading?

Has the wind stirring between heaven and earth become calm?

Why don’t rocks and stones fly up?

Where have the dead birds gone?

When all the birds die, what comes after the Pleistocene?

Birds of the Pleistocene

(Munhakdongne, 2021) 

Glaciers’ Funeral*

People gathered at the foot of the Alps.

Mourners at the Pizol glaciers’ funeral have come quite a long way.

Men in black suits and black hats,

women in black dresses and black scarves or veils,

and children too who

have to live in a world where Earth’s glaciers have melted.

On the glaciers’ graves of scattered stones

hands putting down flowers.

A funeral dirge from the horn echoed through the air.

In Iceland, Ok Glacier became the first

to lose its status as a glacier,

and a memorial ‘A Letter to the Future’ was erected on the spot.**

Whenever Earth’s temperature rises,

the white army of the glacier fought with all its might,

but it was a long time ago that the huge front lines began to crumble.

In the battle of fire and ice,

there is only retreat, retreat, retreat, retreat.

The Columbia Glacier has retreated as much as four kilometers during the last three years***

Blue blood has flown into the sea,

large and small drift ices are floating like the bodies of the dead in the war,

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The world has already lost many roofs.

The Alpine ice cap and

the ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro, all are just around the corner.

Store Glacier, Solheim Glacier, Matanuska Glacier, Petermann Glacier, Ok Glacier, Surprise Glacier, Planpincieux Glacier, Upsala Glacier, Mendenhall Glacier, Great Aletsch Glacier, Perito Moreno Glacier, Franz Josef Glacier, Muir Glacier, Athabasca Glacier, Vatna Glacier, Taylor Glacier, Krone Glacier, Briksdal Glacier, Jakobshavn Glacier, Larsen Glacier, Smith Glacier, Pope Glacier, Kohler Glacier, Totten Glacier

We came from that vanishing, vanishing chunk of ice.

Drifting far away from the ice skirt and living in the city of fire, we

may be awakened by the scream of a glacier cracking,

then realize later,

dreams filled with blue blood are not only dreams

but also the funeral for glaciers day after day.

* On September 22, 2019, at an altitude of 2,700 m in the Swiss Alps, near the summit of the Mount Pizol, more than 250 local residents and environmentalists held a funeral for the Pizol glacier to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

** A memorial for a glacier in Iceland that disappeared after seven hundred years.

*** Words of James Balog, an American photographer, in Jeff Orlowski’s documentary Chasing Ice (2012).

Glaciers’ Funeral*

(Munhakdongne, 2021)

How Far the Rose Came From

A bunch of roses just delivered

How far the rose came from,

Surely these are not the flowers from Kenya?

A bundle of roses

Left a long trail of carbon footprints, mainly on a highway.

Leaving the hands that cut and trimmed the roses,

loaded into a refrigerated truck, and on the way here,

the flowers have suppressed the desire to bloom again and again

and now finally bloom after arriving at the wholesale store

People of the city

can’t notice the smell of gasoline mixed with the scent of roses.

To make a single rose bloom,

it requires seven to thirteen liters of water,

not a scops owl’s crying since spring,

and a lot more gasoline than that.

Nature of twenty roses

Fragmented scent

Flowers withering at a terrifying speed as soon as they bloom

A bunch of roses to be thrown into the incinerator, not a compost pile

Today, let’s follow the invisible carbon footprint

until a bundle of roses bloom and wilt.

How Far the Rose Came From 

(Munhakdongne, 2021)

Milk Cows

The milk cows inside the barn

They’ve never stepped on grass.

Instead of wet grass, cows eat,

the feed in a cart moving along the rails,

and feed the milking robots back and forth.

Electronic devices and cameras

Read the exact position of the cows and udders.

The washing rollers whirr all at once,

and the milking robots attach a nipple cup and start milking.

The cows, no longer surprised at

the scanning of the red 3D laser,

rotating like a conveyor belt,

let themselves go with the robots.

Twenty-four hours a day, all week,

without a break for several years,

We milk your cows.

Yes, we need more robots!

To employ these consistent employees,

with no strikes, no absences,

We get a bank loan,

renovate the barn,

buy hygiene products and disinfectants,

grow more corn for feed,

buy more tractors to do that,

keep running the milking robots to meet the quota,

send cows with problems to a slaughter house,

negotiate prices with the executive of a large company,

we milk our heads dry

grab our lives

and squeeze

Downing a few glasses of leftover milk, you tap at the calculator,

How many more machines should I put in?

How many more cows should I dispose of?

Milk Cows

(Munhakdongne, 2021)

A Black Leaf

Was a certain disaster foretold

by the name of that place?

Chernobyl, the black leaf

It’s too easy for humans who cannot make a leaf

to turn a whole city into a black leaf.

Defects in the reactor,

a few coincidences or inevitabilites,

and the blinding flames, what would happen after that

no one could have predicted or imagined.

Endless dead bodies near the power plant

Two-headed birds

Fish without fins

Apple trees that no longer bloom

Deformed tomatoes and potatoes

Bread and salt imbued with death

Dogs and cats irradiated

Horses drooling and bleeding

A man’s whole body covered with ulcers and sores

A pregnant woman and a girl who died suddenly

But no one now talks about the deaths of 1.5 million people.

The inhabitants in a thirty kilometers radius were relocated,

But over two million Belarusians still remain in the contaminated areas*

Famine continues for several years,

a hungry beast grows inside people, one by one,

burns everything combustible in the house,

eats away even the inedible,

and eats off the plague like a sandwich of death.

Neither seen nor heard,

the radiation that burned the world like a black leaf

is so deeply rooted that

the particles of fire never disappear even if dirt is removed and removed.

Only fear can teach us,**

she said, but

what did we learn from a few nuclear lessons?

Occasionally, tourists come to see the signs of disaster.

Grass and trees are abundant among the ruined buildings,

and wild animals abound, but

no one sits on the grass or picks berries.

At the place where the broken statue of Prometheus

and the angel of death stand together.

* Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, Dalkey Archive, 2005.

** Ibid.

A Black Leaf

(Munhakdongne, 2021)

Blood and Oil

Oil is the devil’s excrement,

Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso once said.*

As the Minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons of Venezuela,

he led the establishment of OPEC, but knew quite well

he knew better than anyone else

that oil is a powerful vehicle for corruption and conflict,

Rockefeller, to sell more of his own oil,

dumped lamps and stoves on the cheap.

With 100 million oil barrels sold to the world every day

Their greatest fear was a drop in consumption.

Drill and drill again!

As if the climate crisis isn’t an issue,

drilling towers piping into clay and bedrock,

data sent to the data center,

the Earth torn to shreds and riddled with holes.

Is there anybody who hasn’t drunk

this juice of death, constantly pumped from the ground?

These fossil fuels, arising from dead organisms

and ascending through chimneys and exhaust vents,

will slaughter the Earth the most quickly.

Oil and gas

exported with war,

might also disrupt their supplies for a long time.

In winter, when the price of crude oil and gas skyrockets,

I think of a natural gas pipeline passing through the Baltic Sea.

They say

oil and gas have their own spirit.

Instead of teaching the horror of depletion and apocalypse,

let them serve a new god,

let them know the beauty of the blazing flame.

Red as blood

redder than blood

finally, red with blood,

Ye who stain the world,

No more bleeding for oil.

The blood is red, the oil is black, but

blood and oil

belong to the same lineage called Porphyrin.**

as Russian oil and Ukrainian blood sometimes

can be synonyms.

* Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, re.press, 2008.

** Ibid.

Blood and Oil

(The Quarterly Changbi, 2023) 

Water’s Borderline

The water of the world

is spinning faster and faster.

As fresh water rises north,

water in the tropics and the subtropics is drying up.

Water in the southern hemisphere

is sucked helplessly into the northern hemisphere,

When was the last time I saw a raindrop?

Refugees moving north and north in search of water

though there is no war,

Standing in line at the border,

they wait only to be sucked into a rubber hose.

But the border is as hard as ice.

Raindrops do not fall,

Only dry stones are

stacked like a rugged monument.

In the far distance, the glacier collapses helplessly,

The water of the world

starts spinning faster and faster,

the freshwater line is rising north

like the waterweed line

like the tree line

Day after day, a new water line is drawn on the map.

Water’s Borderline

 (Sangjinghag-yeonguso, Aug. 2022)

A Spider Starfish

Having no eyes,

no brain.

Seeing with my whole body,

Feeling with my whole body,

Thinking with my whole body,

I notice in the depths of the deep sea,

that a predator approaches

that light descends or is refracted

and that even the shadows move.

With my five arms and a thousand limestone lenses

I can find food or shelter,

I can run away nimbly

Even if my arm is ripped off

My body is regenerated, exhaling light instead of moans.

     I am mutilated, therefore I exist.

               I respond, therefore I exist.

  I run away, therefore I exist.

          I move on, therefore I exist.

  I am regenerated, therefore I exist.

          I multiply, therefore I exist.

               I am intertwined, therefore I exist.

          I communicate, therefore I exist.

  I connect, therefore I exist.

     I diffract, therefore I exist.

  I reflect, therefore I exist.

          I transform, therefore I exist.

Now you need to think with your eyes

You must learn how to see with your brain.

Like a spider starfish,

Like an echinoderm, neither a spider nor a starfish.

A Spider Starfish

(Position, vol. 38, 2022) 

A Mushroom at the End of the World

Have you ever heard the sound of a spore popping?

I was squatting on the veranda,

‘cause I couldn’t sleep late at night.

Like a faint firecracker,

the spores of mushrooms were bursting from the pot.

In the night garden,

something amazing was happening.

The day after a rain,

mushrooms will sprout in the forest, too.

A forest of rocks, moss, roots, and hyphae intertwined like a net.

Mushrooms love shade.

Mushrooms grow feeding on dead trees.

Termites that can chew wood but cannot digest it,

fungi that help their digestion, in their

garden, mushrooms, instead of flowers, will spread their skirts wide.

Imagining the underground world

I walked along a damp, winding road,

into the deeper forest, into the farther and farther forest.

In Morocco, Korea, Bhutan, and from a distant place

Matsutake is calling me.*

Into the forest, where the spore-popping sounds like firecrackers

towards the mushroom at the end of the world.

* Tsing Anna L., The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton University Press, 2015).

 A Mushroom at the End of the World

 (Position, vol. 38, 2022) 

By Ra Heeduk

All Poems Translated by Eun-Gwi Chung

Korean Works Mentioned: 

• “Easter Sunday,” “Glaciers’ Funeral,” “How Far the Rose Came From,” “Milk Cows,” “Birds of the Pleistocene,”  “A Black Leaf,” Possibilist (Munhakdongne, 2021)

    「어떤 부활절」, 「빙하 장례식」, 「장미는얼마나 멀리서 왔는지」, 「젖소들」, 「검은 잎사귀」, 『가능주의자』 (문학동네,2021)

• “Blood and Oil,” (The Quarterly Changbi, 2023) 

「피와 석유」, (창작과비평 199호, 2023)

• “Water’s Borderline,” (Sangjinghag-yeonguso, Aug. 2022)

「물의 국경선」, (상징학연구소 2022년 가을호, 2022)

• “A Spider Starfish,” (Position, vol. 38, 2022) 

「거미불가사리」, (포지션 38호, 2022)

• “A Mushroom at the End of the World,” (Position, vol. 38, 2022) 
「세상 끝의 버섯」, (포지션 38호, 2022)