natalia

“The Sky is full to the brim with autumn
as the season makes its way to across it.
It is as if I had no worries at all.
so I could count all the stars nestled in autumn.
Yet i cannot quite finish counting all those stars
that are settling in my heart one by one,
because mornings have a way of coming swiftly,
because tomorrow's night is still to come,
and because the fire of my heart hasn't burn out yet.
I see memories in one star
and love in another
and loneliness
my longings
and poetry in each
and Mother in another, Mother.
Mother, I am trying to call out a beautiful word for each star.
Names of the kids I shared desk with in a grade school, such foreign
girls names as Pae, Kyeong, Ok, and the girls who have become
mothers already, my poor neighbors, the doves, puppies, rabbits,
mules, roe deer, Francies Jammes and Rheiner
Maria Rilke - I call
such names of poets.
They are all so far away from me.
Just as the stars are ever distant.
And mother,
you are in North Gando which is so far away.
Longing for something I couldn't name,
I wrote my own name on this hill
which is bright with all the starlight landing,
but then I covered it up again with dirt.
True, some insects chirp through the night
because they lament their shameful names.
Yet when spring comes around to my star after winter,
even on this hill where my name is buried,
shrubs will grow thick as if boasting
like the green grass that sprouts on a grave.”
― Yun Dong-ju, Sky, Wind, and Stars

“This time no one's looking for love
down between the sheds, the old houses, among the twittering
masts and rigging. A boat, a prau that will never sail again
puffs and snorts, thinking there's something it can catch
The drizzle brings darkness. An eagle's wings flap,
brushing against the gloom; the day whispers, swimming silkily
away to meet harbor temptations yet to come. Nothing moves
and now the sand and the sea are asleep, the waves gone.

That's all. I'm alone. Walking,
combing the cape, still choking back the hope
of getting to the end and, just once, saying the hell with it
from this fourth beach, embracing the last, the final sob.”
― Chairil Anwar, The Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar

“and the reason I am living is
only because I am looking for what I have lost.

-The Road”
― Yun Dong-ju, Sky, Wind, and Stars

“Why do I know I exist if I also know I will not? Why was I given access to logical space and the mathematical structure of the world? Just to lose them when my body is destroyed? Why do I wake up in the night with the thought that I will die, why do I sit up, drenched in sweat, and scream and slap myself and try to suppress the thought that I will disappear for all eternity, that I will never be again, to the end of time? Why will the world end with me? We age: we stand quietly in line with those condemned to death. We are executed one after the other in a sinister extermination camp. We are first stripped of our beauty, youth, and hope. We are next wrapped in the penitential robe of illness, weariness, and decay. Our grandparents die, our parents are executed in front of us, and suddenly time gets short, you suddenly see your reflection in the axeblade.

And only then do you realize you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person that you see coming out of the factory gates in a Mélies film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead. That we all come into this world from a frightening abyss without our memories, that we suffer unimaginably on a speck of dust, and that we then perish, all in a nanosecond, as though we had never lived, as though we had never been.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid