Poems of Dr. Koo Myongsook (South Korea)

Poetess Dr. Koo Myongsook

Poet Dr. Koo Myongsook was born in Nonsan, Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea. She graduated from Sookmyung Women's University with a degree in Korean literature and later earned her Ph.D. in literature from Bielefeld University in Germany. She received the New Writer's Award from the monthly literary magazine Simunhak in 1999 and from Poetry and Poetics in 2009.
She has held various academic and cultural leadership positions, including Visiting Professor at Soka University in Japan, Visiting Professor at Waseda University, Director of the Sookmyung Leadership Development Institute, Director of the Museum and Cultural Center, President of the Korean Women's Literary Association, Chief Editor of Our Literature, Chairperson of the Korea Gender Equality Education Promotion Institute, Policy Advisory Member for the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, Mediator at the Seoul Family Court, Chief Editor of Siseon, Director of the Literature House Seoul, and Vice President of the Korean Women's Literary Association.
Currently, she is an Emeritus Professor at Sookmyung Women's University, President of the Glocal Women's Network, Director of the Korean Women's Organizations Council, Director of the National Museum of Korean Literature, Advisory Member for Korea Women Consumers News, Senior Vice President of the Seocho Cultural Center, and Vice President of the World Poetry Literature Society.
Her poetry collections include How Many Bushels of Rice Has That Woman Washed to Cook?, Walking, Life Is, Sky Tree (selected as an excellent literary book in the 2014 Sejong Book Program), The Art of Flowers, You, Pietà, Heartfelt, Asking the Spring River off the Way of Poetry, and Where Do Clouds Go?.
Her academic publications include Understanding Korean Women's Literature, The Horizon of Han Moo-sook’s Literature, Women Communicating Through Literature, A Collection of Women's Literature (From Liberation to the 1960s) Vol. 1-6, Diaspora and Korean Literature, War-time Literary Discourse and the Reconstruction of Collective Memory, and edited works such as Anthology of Women's Short Stories from the Liberation Period, Anthology of Korean Women's Essays (1945-1953), Anthology of Korean War-Era Women's Literature, Bibliography of Works by Korean Women Writers: From Liberation to the 1960s, and Selected Works of Representative Korean Women Poets.
She has received numerous awards, including the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education Award, the Manhae "Nim" Poetry Award, the Excellence Award from Poetry and Poetics, the Seocho Writers’ Association Grand Prize, and the Grand Prize from the World Poetry Literature Society.
 
 
To Dream
 
 
If I am to dream,
I would be a single blade of grass
plain, unadorned, untouched by elegance.
 
Lying in that meadow,
gazing up at the sky,
I would be a drop of dew lifting into height.
 
Shedding all that clothes me
outer and inner alike,
I would drift away, a speck of white cloud.
 
And when I fill the empty jar within my dream,
I would live green again,
no more than a humble earthen-bowl poem.
 
 
 
Roots
 
A single seed falls
Into a crevice of rock.
A light breeze, out of breath, drifts by and whispers,
“Ride on my back, you cannot live here.”
 
On the night the torrential rain fell, shoulders crumbling
A mountain bird kept watch, crying in sorrow.
 
In that narrow edge of a crack,
With no greed at all, growing only enough to endure,
One red blossom opened.
 
Now a single flower stalk, leaning halfway over,
Rests on a steadfast rock, smiling bright.
 
 
Nail
 
 
The nail that once upheld the cross,
as much as it rusted,
my years too have rusted red.
 
Knowing it was rusting,
yet unable to pull it out,
I lived like a buoy, years of drifting.
Forgetting is a state of suspended death…
 
Around the hole left by the clumsily pulled nail,
between my rusted, bent waist,
the wind of endurance cuts to the bone.
 
As the nail slips out,
one person slips away,
and in that vacancy the ebb tide whirls
bearing a wooden cross, the river flows on.