Epitaph in a Paupers’ Cemetery
Though most considered it a curse,
I tried to live by writing verse,
Which ought to make it pretty clear
not only why I’m dead, but here.
Found in Translation
Sitting at Night
A quiet valley with no man’s footprints,
An empty garden lit by the moon.
Suddenly my dog barks and I know
A friend with a bottle is knocking at the gate.
—Om Ui-gil (17th Century)
Tr. Kim Jong-gil
The bottle empty on the table.
My friend gone, and me with a headache.
I go outside and look at the moon.
I blink and blink, but still there are two of them.
Bruce Bennett‘s most recent book is Just Another Day in Just Our Town, Poems: New And Selected, 2000-2016 (Orchises Press, 2017). His most recent chapbooks are Our Rough Beast: The Year of Trump (FootHills Publishing, 2017) and First Reader (Wells College Press, 2017), a letterpress sequence of fourteen poems dedicated to his long-time friend David Berman, whose poems appear in this issue of Light. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Wells College and still hangs out in Aurora, New York.