Night Predator

 

3:54 a.m.
Tired and sleepy
Waiting to ambush the hapless night roaches
*****in the onslaught of light
To fling them in the fetid bucket of dishwater
*****(which will tomorrow water the desert)
A last guilty glance at life’s desperate flailings
*****or failings?
*****with its many legs
A sourness in the heart and stomach
The ache no playlist will placate

 

White Night by Ki Hyeong-do

translated by geul from the Korean

The snow ceases.
In the cloudy windowpane of a house in Incheon a light goes out
The sky floats like a hard board
stuck between low roofs
The wind easily wraps the dirty walls
with an inestimable width
The sleety snow splatters upward screaming
A fellow is walking slowly
through the subtitles of a scratched-up black and white film
curved fingers like some farm tool, the fellow manages
to remember a few bottles worth of intoxication left somewhere
parts with the last cigarette in front of a shuttered shop.
Although the vacant alley is melancholy like a spread blanket
sleety snow above the low candlelight
the sound of a few coughs drawn-out and shaking.
Passing beneath a few darkly frozen signboards
arms swinging, where is the fellow going?
This night, where light cannot be distinguished from darkness
banging brilliant, this fearsome white night
making a snow path that hardens the more with each step
his fretful young son on his back under an army parka

 

 

poem in Korean