7) Homecoming for a Festive Day

     Wolran Kim

 

The Full Moon Harvest Day in August crosses the Pacific

I go to visit my ancestral graves, buying tickets of memories

When the dried Harvest Moon shines on

The wrinkled smile walks out of the photo album

Whenever I turn the page of time, monitoring the empty room

Their documentary evidence is too thin

Although it was the busiest holiday season

Touching their souls without a solid feeling

“Today is Chuseok*!”

Saying that, I sit by them on a monumental stone

Tear-stained wind beyond the Chupunglyong pass

Make a ceremonial bow

The lunch box that I opened wearing a school uniform

Familiar side dishes are prepared

The hill becomes sour like Kimchi juice

Which soaked my textbook corners

Red juice drops, like seawater

On my mother’s last destination of her autumn travel

Colored with her floral print dress

On the land where she had lived, seeming like late fall

The spring flowers still bloom on that sloping graveyard?

When the homecoming train that fell into the ocean whistles again

As if they know all about the overgrowth

That mixed race children are born in this world

The face of the other world is printing again

On the pictures that opened as memorial offerings

The moonlight sits around for a long time

 

* Chuseok: Korean for “the great middle of autumn.” It is a major harvest festival.