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.
