The Wind’s Private Life by Yi Byeong-Ryul (이병률)

Autumn is cold, water too is cold. 
The moment my shadow, that had been wandering here and there in a circular cruel room 
slowly nibbling leaves, sighed 

At that moment might the word man have arisen? 
That remote long-ago today 

At the place where that word man went soaring aloft 
might a sorrowful blunt icicle been attached? 

It’s a breast kneaded with sorrow, like the wind, like a bow, 
otherwise, surely, it could never be so out-of breath. 
Saying it’s the sound of a far-away train won’t do, 
and saying it’s the smell of rain will do even less. 
I can grasp the inner and outer aspects of the word woman 
but the word man, that nothing seems capable of replacing, 
is sorrowful and cold, so as I try to grasp my wife who struggles to escape, 
it seems hot blood will well from my hands. 

At first sunlight appeared but then eyes’ light would also appear, 
the breast would appear, feelings would appear. 
The wind’s habit, turning one man into two, 
ten men into twenty, a hundred, a thousand, 
then commits them to the flames, 

devouring that wind as I look back, 
making the blood circulate in my tree and branches, 
is what has made the millennia flow heedlessly past before you. 
That wind has not yet, not yet ended splendidly.