Fireworks
 
What are these sudden
fireworks?
Some happy event must have occurred
in the middle of my body.
A petard went soaring up early in the evening,
dazzling bright in my left side;
circling my waist another petard
shot up in my right side, then here and there, everywhere
fireworks started going off.
Fireworks of pain, non-stop
for three days, a week, day and night, tireless,
a new world of suffering
wrenched open in the center of my body,
an iron-fisted rule of pain.
Oh, I wish I were in a land of no pain.
Are they for a triumphal feast
celebrating cancerous cells’ capture of my body?
Muscles, fiber by fiber,
flesh, bit by bit,
cluster after cluster of fire-flowers
flutter down little by little, pile up
in every gap of my skeleton.
Falling fire-flowers are splendid but
more splendid still those newly blooming.
I struggle to say some words in prayer
gazing up at the stars in the sky
but my clenched molars won’t even let my lips open.
Pain is its own luminosity.
Every bone turns to charcoal and burns,
a brazier-full in the middle of my body
for a month and more.
How could I forge
a new life,
even tiny as a needle’s point,
in these savage flames?
Oh, could these magnificent fireworks
where drops of sweat fall, swooning pearls,
be labor pains?
May they be labor pains.


Translation in collaboration with Jongsook Lee