How did you come to me?
You did come, didn’t you?
Like a raindrop stirring up dry earth?
Like a puddle of rainwater?
Like a butterfly’s damp wings?
I walked beside you toward the woods, didn’t I?
Did we kiss in the shadow of flowers?
Did the woods grow more crimson with our warmth?
Did you hear
the sound of thousands of bees shaking their wings in unison?
What should we call that entrancing buzzing?
Love is a buzzing?
You did say that, laughing, didn’t you?
That wood was really there, wasn’t it?
But what became of all those buzzing bees?
The flowers, and you, where are you?
I have not yet managed to come back to myself, you know.
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.
