Oh, My Mother—Her Voice - O Yŏng-jae

Los Angeles and Taejon,

The Pacific in between.

The phone conversation between Mother and Chairman Yŏng-hŭi

Graciously sent to me;

Unwinding the cassette tape

I listen to Mother’s voice.

The voice is not familiar,

Foreign to my ears,

So I listen . . . over and over.

The sound revives far-gone days,

And Mother’s voice

That echoed that day;

The voice

That sang lullabies in a low tune,

When by the window on a snowy day, she,

Walking to and fro, piggybacked me;

The voice that searched for me on the other side of darkness

When I walked a long night’s walk back home alone.

After setting a birthday table,

With the scent of steamed rice-cake filling the air,

The voice that woke me:

“Yŏng-jae, honey, time to wake up”.

This same voice echoes,

Breaking through the veil of distant years.

The sound that floats over

My childhood and boyhood

Days gone by, so far away.

Those familiar sounds she made, opening and closing the gate at home;

The sound of her grinding barley in a mortar jar in the morning and the evening.

The sound that carries me

The tears she squeezed out

Sitting in front of the smoky kitchen fire hole

And the camellia oil.

The voice familiar to Mother’s ears

That I finally found

After fumbling efforts,

The sound I can’t erase in one lifetime.

Let us not live, divided apart, any more.

Mother’s voice

Crying out for me, choked.

Come hurry on, to Mother’s arms,

Come hurry on, to Mother’s arms,

With the sun of harmony in your chest.

It calls me,

Ah, Mother’s voice!

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O Yŏng-jae (1935 - 2011) North Korea

Translated by Chae-Pyong Song

Source: Korean Poetry in Translation