76) A Winter Hairtail

       Wolran Kim

Standing over the white snowy night

Seventy years of spicy pepper soaking into the red meat

In the kimchi jar

Palpitating time which was once a part of the sea

A few silver hairtails with bones were fermenting

In her garden that seemed like the coastline of her hometown

With the mother spirit that plants the sea on the land

The hairtail was fermented by the cold sound of the water vein

Her naked body has no shiny scales

Yearning and sorrow mellow as the smell of mud on dry land

The silver waves rise from sea level

Those days were also dream-like

Cabbage was piled into pyramids

Seemed holy as the autumn harvest of her entire life

In her mixed time, the waist of her life grew stiff with a towel

In my childhood, she took kimchi through the door of a hard winter

It makes me sore as if I had put frostbitten feet on the hot ondol* floor

Even without winter kimchi,**even without a buried jar

In the fall of my middle-age, I eat a piece of hairtail

Was it just yesterday or the day before yesterday?

Plowing through the river that never freezes, even in the winter

As a habit, I eat my mom, who is like a Cretaceous fossil

 

* Ondol: A traditional Korean heating system that transfers heat from a stove to an adjoining room via horizontal smoke passages under a thick floor.

** Winter Kimchi: Koreans prepare kimchi for the winter, and they used to bury it underground in the olden days because there was no refrigeration. They also put many different kinds of fish in kimchi depending on the locale.