Thin-shelled snails
 
Every day a red-bellied frog living in the rapids
gulps down
thin-shelled snails thinking they’re good to eat
then quickly spits them out
with a grimace
having found they taste awful.
I’m clinging like a drop of dew to a leaf
at the edge of a cliff where the river rushes by.
I wish I were that snail just vomitted up
from the frog’s gullet.
 
The snail is very slow today, as ever,
heedless of the passage of time,
and its taste is nothing special, too.


Translation in collaboration with Jongsook Lee