A nun

By Baek Seok


A Buddhist nun had her palms together and vowed.

I could smell the scent of asters from her.

Her lonesome face was as old as the old days.

I felt sad like the Buddhist scriptures.

I had bought corns from a woman of a wan face,

Around a gold mine in a deep mountain of Pyungan-do*.

She'd wept like a frosty autumn night with beating her little girl.


Ten years had gone by waiting for her husband who had left like a flare of firewoods.

He didn't come back,

Her little girl went to stone grave finding balloon flowers.


There was a sad day when pheasants in the mountain were also crying sorrowfully.

There was a day when a woman's hair dropped like a tear,

On the corner of the backyard in a small temple of the mountain.





* Pyungan-do : A province of the Korean Penninsula. Now it's in the North Korean territory.

* Baek Seok : A Korean poet(1912 - 1996)