Ko Un - Maninbo - Peace & War

who had no luck with horoscopes and was always quarrelling.

Then, when that poet went to prison,

he deposited the poet’s meagre royalties in the bank.

The full moon rose

over a hillside slum in Bongcheon-dong, southern Seoul.

A young man was climbing the steep path

around 11.30 p.m.

after working overtime.

His name was Yun Sang-gon, he had grown up well,

though knowing nothing of father or mother.

At the top of the steep path

someone was waiting for him in an alleyway, freezing cold.

Her name was Kim Sun-ja.

The full moon was high in the sky.

In a world abounding with the sound of moonlight,

how could poverty be all there was?

Twenty-year-old Sang-gon’s tough hand

seized seventeen-year-old Sun-ja’s coarsened hand.

Sun-ja had no smell of face-powder.

There was nothing like, ‘I love you’.

The young man trembled as he spoke:

‘Let’s not change.’

Choking, the girl nodded.

She bit her lips in confusion and blood gathered in her mouth.

The 38th parallel cut the Korean peninsula in two

from the summer of 1945.

Once again

after the summer of 1950

the DMZ divided the Korean peninsula

with guns aimed across at each other since 1953.

One hundred and sixty miles of barbed wire.

Father in the North,

and son in the South were both experts on birds.

The son in the south tied his name

to a bird’s leg and set it loose.

A few years later

the father in the north

set loose a bird carrying his name.

No message.

Had there been a message

it would have been a crime against national security

under the South’s anti-communist laws,

and a crime under the North’s criminal laws.

Each merely attached his name to a bird,

set it free,

sent it back.

That southern son was Won Byeong-o, a professor at Kyunghee University.

The father was an ornithologist in North Korea.

The beauty of blood ties in this time of division

was also the sorrow of the son’s

already bald head.

On a corner of Hyoje-dong opposite Jongno 5ga in Seoul

all day long

a blind beggar lay hunched over

wearing dark glasses.

He was murmuring something,

no telling what,

murmuring, murmuring.

Placing before him a ragged cap

he collected 10 won coins, 100 won coins.

Considering the patient hard work of not moving all day long,

the beggar’s wage was far too low.

Apart from occasional crackdowns,

our country offers the freedom and right to be a beggar.

But this beggar, once night fell,

rose to his feet, holding a slender cane,

and quietly headed for the alley of bars

on the slopes of Ehwa-dong.

There he removed his dark glasses and opened blind eyes.

He ordered a drink at his regular bar,

‘Hey, give me soju and that.’

‘That’ usually meant a side-dish of spicy fried brawn.

Five years later, that fake blind beggar moved

to the station square down in Jochiwon, South Chungcheong province.

A little thief is better

than a thief,

than a big thief.

A beggar is better

than a little thief.

Why, wasn’t Sakymuni a chief of beggars?

In Goguryeo, the nation founded by Go Ju-mong at age fifteen

the royal palace was a thatched cottage.

The waters of the Yalu rose far off.

Day by day the nation prospered.

The cottage turned into an imposing palace.

The sixth king, Taejo,

ascended the throne aged seven.

The king played with his top.

His mother looked after the child-king.

King Jinheung of Silla, too,

became king at seven,

while his aunt exercised royal power.

Isn’t regency more than playing the king?

His height when sitting was that of an ordinary person standing unnoticed.

While studying at the Jinju Agricultural High School,

and after graduating, too,

he could not for an instant live without Buddhism.

Already married, and one daughter.

First he crossed the sea,

staying at a number of temples in Japan,

then returned to become a monk at Okcheon-sa temple in Goseong,

the Venerable Bak Han-yeong his master.

After studying his fill

he went to deliver a sermon

at Hoguk-sa temple in Jinju, his home.

In the evening following the sermon

his mother came into his room

and produced a kitchen knife from her sleeve.

If you don’t come back home with me tonight,

I’ll stab myself in the belly until I’m dead.

What I want is a grandson.

He had no choice but to follow his mother

and return to his wife for just that one night.

After that, blaming himself for his apostasy,

he went everywhere barefoot.

And still he nourished great dreams.

So, during the Japanese occupation

he started the National Student Monks’ Assembly.

then in 1954 he organised the National Conference of Monks,

establishing the Jogye Order after a sit-in fast

with a hundred monks and a hundred fifty nuns.

He held several posts, such as first General Manager,

Chairman of the Order Committee,

and Supreme Patriarch.

His preaching was not consistent with logic.

He just went on talking endlessly

no way of telling

beginning end

middle

talking all night long until the day shone bright

skipping even the morning chanting.

He died in November of Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-One, at the age of sixty-nine.

After the Japanese army swept up north in 1592

and the walls of Hanyang, the capital, had fallen,

Neung-un, a monk of Docheon-sa temple, rose up,

gathering seven hundred slow-speaking common folk

in the lower Naepo region of western Chungcheong,

He had always been a stately monk.

Now he tore up his crimson gown, wrapped it round his neck.

With his shaven hair growing long,

his face became that of an angry lion.

He hated the king and his officials

for allowing the invasion,

hated them more than he hated the invading Japanese.

His intention was to attack Hanyang

where the Japanese were stationed,

with Yi Mong-hak and others,

and establish a new world.

When Neung-un was executed, heavy rain poured down.

On the estuary at Onsuri, Ganghwa Island,

only a couple of boats bobbing,

the hostess of a bar

gazes out

across the mist-shrouded sea.

Her pencilled brows

are lovely.

‘It’s time they were here…’

She is waiting

for anglers

to arrive on the last boat

crossing from Incheon.

Today she has not had one customer.

On the window of the bar

there is a sheet of yellowing paper:

TURN YOURSELF IN, RETURN TO THE LIGHT.

REPORT ANYONE SUSPICIOUS.

In the days of the Liberal Party in the 1950s

at Mirae-sa temple in Mireuk Island,

in Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang province,

the disciples of the Great Master Hyobong gathered:

Gusan, Ilgak, Ilcho, Ilgwan and Beopjeong.

Beopcheol and Beopdal were there, too.

And Hwalyeon.

Spring-water-like Hyeyung was also there.