We cull the island's most spectacular fields.
Cheju's long grasses have always belonged to the women.Like our inland sisters who crouch in flocksalong the roadsides, cutting and tyingtall stalks into bundles,we too wrap our heads in white towels, and bend to trimthe jagged underwater lawns.
We envy the sun's long arms, its deep reach.Crystals of light collect on the sea floor,settle like sugar in a glass of water, dustingthe greedy seaweed fronds. When stirred by our fins,light disperses, dissolves. It clings to our bodies.We swim, pollinating the watery garden.
Other crops move in the wet meadow: we huntmobile vegetables -- cucumbers with fingers,flowers with feet!The urchin flees, millimetres per minute,on its single toothed paw. The sola retreatsinto its white turban, tries to pass for one of us.The conch shies from the hand, curls into itselfas a bud cringes before it is picked.
Eighty-nine fires lit on Halla.
Nagasaki, Hiroshima: droppedcasually as pebbles into a pond,but the ripples lashed our shores for years.
Spread on their dissection table,Korea was a little rabbiton a stranger's map,dangling in China's paw or snaggedin the hind paw of Russia
if they had cared to look:they performed their secret operationblindfolded, in a far-away room,the paper decision to sever its headas easy as unpinninga drawn donkey's tail.
Everyone forgets islandsbut the armies.Cheju, both their rabbit's footand a dropping at its heel.Our own countrygnawing us off at the ankleto escape.
What the sea gave back freely moved us first:
He bobbed up, his pale backa bullet-pitted coral,shreds of skin around the woundslike the red blooms of anemone's flower.
His mute body told the whole story,the exact cost of silence --two blunt stumps announced his lost thumbs;his tongue, waterlogged and swollen with secrets,tumbled from the cave of his mouth,dumbstruck as the long-hidden survivorwho emerges from the dark shelter, and stumblesinto the sober, devastated day.
My own child in the basketbeside the water, among the fishbasketsand waterjugs. A boy disguisedas part of our harvest.
The stories from Orari, from Bucholi,of black stones soaked in red.Suddenly, blood oranges.
Hatred is a crafty child,who finds even in a farmer's fieldtorture's toybox:who needs weapons when at handis onion's green-tailed whip,the rape-efficient orange root,and the killstone of white radish.
Every war has its gory theatreit forces the land to watch.Cruelty laughing at the same jokeover and over.
The stories from Gyoraeri.From Oradong.
Eventually we all marry thosewho killed our parents,and call it peace.This is how I know the Northis not lost to us forever.
Land's memoryis so much longerthan water's.
Graves rise from clearings on the orum,the small hills helmet the dead.When rapeflowers grow brighton the little mounds, they sleepcurled like children beneath a yellow blanket.
The trees remind me of fear:hack them to stumps; still, deep rootsstay tangled underground.
The sun says nothing, recedesas if its radiant face would offend.We walk in the timid lightthat filters through the gauze of cloudbandaging the island, afraidto scar the soil with our shadows.
I am full of lessons I cannot share:
How wild grass cleans the mistfrom goggles, how to hook the sicklecordat the elbow, not the neck.
How to find feather stars and sea lilies.The flounce of scallops, sea slugs' ruffled skirts,the split gourd shape of cuttlefish.
How the concave of the abalone,its hard slick of colour, is like the skinof gasoline on water, a liquid prism.
The depth of crab and shrimp. The mythof sand dollars, the bottle mouths of sea squirts.Polyps. Molluscs.
How we learned to respecttheir reluctance to leave, the bravado of shells.How we learned to lovethe sea's slow resistance.
