Your verses are fulfilling and delicious. They taste as the dish of fried potato with wood fire grilled village groomed road runner (chicken). The dexterity exhibited in all areas of content and form is blood rippling. Sungrye Han, you captured variegated facets of life with the diligent eye of a sharp cinematographer. As, I grazed through your poems, I saw walking shadows of humanity dead and living. I passed through mist -clad red hills of home, and watched life -hardened mothers chirruping cheap gossip along their rain- beaten countryside roads to their usual water-wells. I read life through golden but ragged garments of paradox. I sang along the tenor of whistling mountain gusts and danced to the fervent sopranos of birds. Such is real poetry. Real poetry rattles the marrow and real poetry chills or warms the spine. Your literary prowess is unwatchable. TIME OF POET REPUBLIC profiles excellence, dexterity and prowess in the personality of Legendary Korean Writer and Distinguished Scholar Professor Sungrye Han. Let me also thank Jaehyung Park for translating this submission from Korean into English. Aluta Continua– (Blurb by Mbizo CHIRASHA).
Pair-Bond Snakes
They are devouring each other’s tails
Sun goes down a little
It is the time that a brain stem moves reversely
They eat each other’s body from the tails slowly
By a sense left on the bottom of the instinct
With the latch of the unconscious unlocked
As if they get mesmerized by each other
They grow short at the same rate
The loop become stronger while they become shorter
They gobble symbols, notions, and satiety
Two pair of snakes get shorter and shorter infinitely
To be rounded out
Sucking each other’s scarlet blood
They are completed as a great circle
Two pair of snakes that are taking each other’s body eternally
Red sun
Falls into the sea this moment
Hometown Well
To accumulate blood, women’s bodies suffer an ache
Earth makes underground water circulated through its whole body
And wombs are always burning
By the fever of blood opening its own ways to gather
Once a month, for replacing water
Women gather around the well
And in the middle of rice field of my hometown
That is afraid to be focused by many eyes
There is the well of my childhood
That has a wide open hole towards the sky
Women are pumping up water
To let their heated body cool
Sin that everybody has kept in the secret at least one
The hotness that blazed up in mind helplessly
Cold water that soaks to the bone even in the middle of summer
Hometown well where we pumped water up with a gourd
Around the well
The existences who commit crimes at the previous life
Crawly gather together
And all of them are hanging or are standing on their hands
As a shape of small stringy snakes, a huge serpents and vipers
The well side where they cooled off their body at the former life
They show up there following their blissful crimes,
Even unavoidable due to their moistened bodies
A husband who was affected by leprosy and went away to the island
A baby whose father was her husband’s brother
A woman who threw her baby into the well
A young widow with
A father of her husband who had lived alone since he was young
A moistened woman, women
The well side in my memory
Is overflowing with thousands rumors even in my dreams
The planet conceiving a few lies
Is the devil a man who deceive someone
With a little bit of truth that a great untruth combined
A word that is born a moment ago is lighter than a dandelion
A word that is buried waits her own resurrection on the wind path
A word that is missing threw herself a long ago
The spring has come like investigating something, but it is not the real one.
A noon that sun is blazing like midsummer
Full bloom of roses take season’s false pulse
As they conceive a smell of death
In the heart of the planet
Swirling frenzied blood that is gang-raped, comes across straits
The womb of the planet
We don’t need any sonogram
A chunk labeled as an embryo
And a boundary of water
From fish, amphibian, reptile to mammal
That evolutionary seal
That false package of gene
Today, a gunfire bursts somewhere on the planet again
I can hear the heartbeat of the planet
An Embryo born today remembers the sound
<Translation by Jaehyung Park>
Sungrye Han / 한성례(韓成禮)Born in 1955 Korea. Poet, Translator(Japanese-Korean). Adjunct professor.She majored in Japanese language and Japanese literature at Sejong University and earned her master’s degree in Japanese studies at Sejong University’s Graduate School of Policy Science.Her works have earned her the Newcomer Award of <Poem and Consciousness>, Korea’s the Heonanseolheon Literature Award and Japan’s Sitosozo Award.Book of Poetry 『The Beauty in a Laboratory, 『Smiling flowers』in Korean, 『The Sky in the Yellowish Red Korean Skirt』, 『Drama of the Light』in Japanese. Historical essay 『The Formation of the Ancient Nation in Japan and Japanese oldest anthology Manyo-shu』 and so on.Her poems express Korean tradition, life and death, sadness, pain and anguish in surrealism, modernism and avant-garde forms.She translated many Japanese literary works into Korean and many Korean literary works into Japanese. This work includes more than 200 volumes, for example, poems, novels, essays, poem anthologies, books for children, humanity books, self enlightenment books and scientific books. In particular, she translated many poems and Book of Poetry between Korea and Japan.In particular, she translated many poems and Book of Poetry between Korea and Japan.Korean textbooks used in Korean high schools contain several translations of her for educational purposes.She has translated and introduced Korean and Japanese poems in literary magazines between the two countries since 1990.She is an adjunct professor at Sejong Cyber University now.
TIME OF THE POET EDITOR -Freedom of Speech Fellow to PEN- Zentrum Deutschland,Germany. Alumni of the International Human Rights Arts Festival in New-York, USA.Literary Arts Activism Diplomatie. Globally Certified Arts Mediums Curator and Influencer. Internationally Published Page and Spoken Word Poet. Writer in Residence. Arts for Human Rights Catalyst. Core Team Member of the Bezine Arts and Humanities Project. His illustrious poetry , hybrid writings , political commentary ,short fiction , book reviews and Arts Features are published in more than 400 spaces notably the Monk Arts and Soul in Magazine in United Kingdom. Atunis Poetry.com in Belgium. Demer press poetry series in Netherlands. World Poetry Almanac in Mongolia.Poesia journal inSlovenia. Bezine Arts and Humanities Webzine in USA. The Poet a Day in Brooklyn ,USA. Litnet Writers Journal in South Africa. African Crayons in Nigeria. Poetry Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Pulp-pit USA.the FictionalCafe international Journal , Texas USA. Best New African Poetry series in Zimbabwe, Zimbolicious Poetry Collections in Zimbabwe. Co-edited Street Voices International Publications with Andreas Weiland in Germany.Co-Edited Silent Voices Anthology, a Tribute to Chinua Achebe. Co-Edited the Corpses of Unity,solidarity collection to victimized Cameroonians with Nsah Mala. Curated and Edited the Zimbabwe We Want Poetry ,Inside Digraceland speaking poetic truth to the Mugabe regime and other bad regimes. He owns the Time of the Poet blog zine ,MIOMBOPUBLISHING that published the #GlobalCallforPeaceProject titled the Second of EARTH is Peace.A LETTER to the PRESIDENT his experimental resistance poetry collection was released in August 2019 by Mwanaka and Media Publishing.. Co- Authored Whispering Woes of Ganges and Zambezi with Sweta Vikram in India. Good Morning President his first poetry collection was published in 2011 by Zimbabwean published based in United Kingdom, Diaspora Publishers.COVID 19 Satansdeadly fart is forthcoming. Chirasha is Founder and the Chief Editor of Brave Voices Poetry Journal, https://bravevoicespress.home.blog/
