(The Gwangju Cemetery where the May 18 heroes rest hopefully in peace.)
A Mother’s Last Words To Her Son: May 1980*
Kim Hyo Seok was just a high school teenager that day in May 1980 when Special Forces arrived before dawn and surrounded the downtown YMCA where he and other pro-democracy protesters had barricaded themselves for several days.
Within minutes, the soldiers opened fire with their tanks and M-16s. By the time the smoke had cleared a few days later in the city of Kwangju, the official body count had passed 500. Some human rights groups have estimated the number of dead as high as 2,000.
-Juan Gonzalez, “Freedom Bid That Shames Us” (Daily News, May 17, 2005)
You went to bed a boy;
waking up to the sound of bloodbath,
you are now a man
Let me reach for the clouds
and banish them from the sky
And then perhaps you will see
the ineffable sadness inside me
My heart has become a prayer:
I am the force
to tie you down to my bosom
But in the end, a son is more than a son
Here you are, spring of my ancient bloodline,
all set to rendezvous with danger
like a stone blindly hurled into the
obsidian air, its path fluctuant
Take a cut of the bread Halmunee baked;
do not forget how peace tastes
Slip into your pocket a handful of dust
from the front yard; remember a home waits
I will join my flowers in their uprising of colors
dancing to the gale from the Yellow Sea,
rustling prayers for Spring to linger
In my bosom, I will cradle your fate
and urge the gods not to forget:
When you were an infant,
I never looked at a withering flower
On your toljabee, you chose the needle and thread
over the bow and arrow;
how you brought the sun down to my palm
on a somber winter as you ate baekseogi!
But you confront your good fortune
I saw how timidity and innocence vanished
from your eyes when the tyrant’s hand
drenched the streets and our people’s dreams
with the blood of the young and old
The darkness in Gwangju
became the lamp unto your path
A son has a mother but he has a country, too
My pride weaves into my fear
I want to say, Go now with my blessings
But even before I release you
to the summons of freedom
on this nameless day
that one day might have a name,
You seem to have already gone away…
-Gwangju, South Korea/ 16 August 2011
