The Casualties
The casualties are not only those who are dead;
They are well out of it.
The casualties are not only those who are wounded,
Thought they await burial by installment
The casualties are not only those who have lost
Person or property, hard as it is
To grape for a touch that some
May not know is not there
The casualties are not those led away by night;
The cell is a cruel place, sometimes a heaven,
No where as absolute as the grave
The casualties are not those who started
A fire and now cannot put to out. Thousands
Are burning that had no say in the matter.
The casualties are not only those who escaping
The shattered shell become prisoners in
A fortress of falling walls.
The casualties are many, and a good number well
Outside the scene of ravage and wreck;
They are the emissaries of rift,
So smug in smoke-room they haunt abroad,
They are wandering minstrels who, beating on
The drum of human heart, draw the world
Into a dance with rites it does not know
The drum overwhelm the guns…
Caught in the clash of counter claims and charges
When not in the niche others have left,
We fall.
All casualties of war,
Because we cannot hear other speak,
Because eyes have ceased to see the face from the crowd,
Because whether we know or
Do not know the extent of wrong on all sides,
We are characters now other than before
The war began, the stay- at- home unsettled
By taxes and rumor, the looter for office
And wares, fearful everyday the owners may return,
We are all casualties,
All sagging as are
The case celebrated for kwashiorkor,
The unforeseen camp-follower of not just our war.
Kim Hyesoon (a lady never tells her age; trans. Choi Don Mee)
Red Scissors Woman
That woman who walks out of the gynecology clinic
Next to her is an old woman holding a newborn
That woman’s legs are like scissors
She walks swiftswift cutting the snow path
But the swollen scissor blades are like fat dark clouds
What did she cut screaming with her raised blades
bloodscented dusk flooding out between her legs
The sky keeps tearing the morning after the snowstorm
A blinding flash of light
follows the waddlewaddling woman
Heaven’s lid glimmers and opens then closes
How scared God must have been
when the woman who ate all the fruits of the tree he’d planted
was cutting out each red body from
between her legs
The sky, the wound that opens every morning
when a red head is cut out
between the fat red legs of the cloud
(Does that blood live inside me?)
(Do I live inside that blood?)
That woman who walks ahead
That woman who walks and rips
with her scorching body her cold shadow
New-born infants swim
inside that woman’s mirror inside her as white as a snowhouse
the stickysticky slow breaking waves of blood
like the morning sea filled with fish
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