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)
