Corals and Mushrooms

By | 13 May 2024
(to Samantha Faulkner)




What do corals and mushrooms have in common?

They reproduce with spores.


We’ve birthed children through sexual reproduction

but now we’re becoming a bit more like corals and mushrooms.


Because we have hard and rugged bones

and have souls that could crumble any second.

Because even when we imagine ourselves in the deep sea

we like to hide in the damp tree shade.


Corals or mushrooms named poetry,

we met in the poem’s shadow where the spores grow.

And we immediately recognised each other’s souls.


She asked about the mushrooms that grow in my poem,

and I asked about the coral reefs that grow in hers.


Just by talking

about the mushroom at the end of the world

about the other side of the world we live

about the hands of the poor digging for forest mushrooms

about the capital flowing behind expensive pine mushrooms

about the well-being of the bleached coral reefs

about the forest fires that have been going on for months

about the eucalyptus trees that need fire to reproduce

we travelled very far.


Though I don’t know that distant sea’s depth

and she has never smelled this land’s dirt


in Thursday Island, her hometown

it was like I caught a glimpse of that blue sky while lying down.

It was like I woke up from a short sleep

surrounded by the friendly faces of First Nations people.1

Though I can’t swim, it was like I followed her

into the deep sea and saw coral reefs.


Tomorrow is the day we say goodbye.

I’m going to say quietly, ‘Yawo,’2 see you next time.






    

  1.  (Translator’s note): The original 부족들 we inferred to be ‘First Nations people’ ↩
    2. 

  2.  Yawo is a greeting used by Torres Strait Islanders when parting ways, meaning ‘small goodbye, see you next time’. ↩
    3.
This entry was posted in INVISIBLE WALLS and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.
Born in 1966, Ra Heeduk holds Masters and Doctoral degrees from the Department of Korean Literature, Yonsei University. In 1989 she won the JoongAng Ilbo Shinchun Literary Award and began her literary career. From 2001 to 2018 she was a professor of Creative Writing at Chosun University, and since 2019 has been a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at Seoul National University of Science and Technology. In 2012, she was a visiting professor at SOAS (Centre for Korean Studies) University of London, and she has served on the editorial advisory boards of the journals Creative Writing and Criticism and The Green Review. She has published a great many collections of poetry, to broad acclaim, and her poetry and prose have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, Vietnamese and Burmese. She has given presentations and poetry readings at international creative workshops, readings and symposia, including the International Creative Writing Program (IWP) in Iowa, the Korean Studies Centre at UC Berkeley, the International Poetry Festival in Costa Rica, the Qinghai Lake International Poetry Festival in China, the Korea-China Writers’ Conference, the Korean-Turkish Literature Symposium, the Auvergne-Vivare Ligon Poetry and Literature Festival in France, the Beijing International Poetry Festival in China, and the Taiwan International Poetry Festival.

More by Ra Heeduk on Cordite Poetry Review →

Related work:

Comments are closed.