Poet's words

Beautiful prayer
On the road of love│What treasure│The language of flowers│What happiness│The words of autumn·│Full moon prayer│Drinking tea│Listening│Come see the flowers│In the forest│Little song 1│Letters play│At the beach│Bible│Watching people│Mother of the heart│Moonlit night│Confession│In memory of poet Yun Dong-ju│Journey│School of life│Beautiful prayer│Song for home│Like when singing in a choir│Summer letter│In the darkness│Little song 2│The words of my prayer│What prayer│Only on lonely days, you

Prayer for Forgiveness
Praise of Gratitude│Face of Happiness│Diary│Time is also busy│Door of the heart│Shameful hands│To the owner of the empty chair│Autumn letter 1│Reconciliation│Parting practice│To joy│What kind of prayer│Friend, you│Sad song│Pilgrimage to the Holy Land│It won't be me, will it?│Hope for the first day of the new year│To the snowy beach│First snow letter│Prayer for forgiveness│Drink tea, us│Letter on a sad day│Who is for me│I can't wear other clothes│Letter written from the sea│Letter to Jesus 1│Letter to Jesus 2│Letter to Jesus 3│Letter to Jesus 4

Prayer for the Poor Bird
The sadness of a promise│Sickbed diary│Blandly, even more blandly│The zelkova tree to me│The words of a bird│The power of tears 4│At sunset│For the birds│The gift of time│Autumn letter 2│Hospitality│Twin monks│The taste of solitude│Autumn wind│Silence│Silence diary│A day that comforts me│Humility·│Some regret│Moonlight greeting│Time alone│In the disappearing silence│The prayer of a poor bird│The words of a dead person│On the path of listening│The last prayer│Year-end postcard│On the path of meeting│Regret

Preface | Purity of the Soul and Rice and Soup by Jeong Ho-seung (poet)
A Little Prayer from Understanding | Things I Want to Do Before Receiving God's Call

Sister Hae-in Lee's new poetry collection, "Small Prayer," follows "Small Joy" and "Small Comfort."
The prayer poems of a monk who loves and embraces even the smallest and most trivial things.

A poet is a being who looks with love at small and trivial things.
A poet is a being who must discover the value of small and insignificant things and love them with destiny.
So, who among the contemporary poets is the representative poet who most consistently paid attention to the small and trivial things and measured their precious meaning with delicate language?
Perhaps many readers will first choose Sister Hae-in.
Sister Lee Hae-in, who presented warm comfort and joy to many readers with her works 『Small Comfort』 and 『Small Joy』, has now published a new poetry collection 『Small Prayer』, which looks after small things with affectionate eyes.
In her new collection of poems, Sister Hae-in Lee shares the slow, even breathing of small things with modern readers who have lost their pace of life, caught up in the big and fast.
Through him, we are reminded of the beauty of life, which is always circulating anew, and of its original place.

Any poem becomes a prayer when it is directed toward a hope that is most earnestly and earnestly desired.
In other words, poetry is the language of prayer that has become song, and prayer is poetry that has spread out from its origin.
Sister Lee Hae-in's new poetry collection, "Little Prayer," sings praise for the pure and beautiful nature of poetry and prayer, and affirms life, in simple yet appealing language.
Since her first poetry collection, 『Territory of Dandelions』, published in 1976, Sister Hae-in Lee has been moving many readers with words of love and warm comfort. This poetry collection also commemorates the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Benedictine Sisters, where Sister Hae-in Lee is currently living as a nun.
It is also a collection of prayer poems by a nun who embraces all things in the world and sings of hope, containing the sincere language of love of Sister Hae-in, who, during her long monastic life, consistently poured her affection and attention into small and trivial things.
"Small Prayer" is a collection of poems that includes some 50 unpublished pieces that she had written in her spare time, along with a few poems from her poetry collection "I Can't Wear Any Other Clothes," which was first published in 1999. It can be seen as a collection of poems that comprehensively encompasses the literary roots of Sister Hae-in Lee, who, as a poet and a nun, hoped that her prayers toward God would become poems themselves.
Sister Hae-in Lee, who endured a painful time battling cancer and witnessing the successive deaths of her loved ones, humbly looks back on the past and expresses the poet's profound realization that affirms the present life in this collection of poems.

Let my prayer to God become a poem.
May my daily life, breathing within you, become a poem that becomes more delicious the more I read it.
Sometimes, let me bravely throw away precious words so that I can live like a shining poem. / Poetry was a play and a song that made me dream. / During my elementary school days, when everyone was depressed and poor amid the ruins of war, the poems of Kim So-wol, Han Yong-un, and Yun Dong-ju that my older brother and sister recited opened my eyes to the beauty of my mother tongue.
―From “The Roots of My Literature” (Lee Hae-in)

A collection of words containing a life-long wish, like a testament, originating from the psalm of small prayers.

Another element that deserves special attention in Sister Hae-in Lee's new poetry collection, "Little Prayer," along with the psalms that make up the text, is the extra gift at the end of the book: a beautiful new prose piece, like a will, filled with Sister Hae-in Lee's earnest and pure wish.
After being diagnosed with colon cancer three years ago, Sister Hae-in endured dozens of grueling chemotherapy treatments and still undergoes regular checkups at the hospital every three months. As she battled the disease, she began to trace the paths of her life and the footsteps she had left along those paths with greater detail and specialness.
This special prose, titled "Things I Want to Do Before I Receive God's Call," conveys three or four things you hope to do before you receive God's call and end your life, and shows Sister Lee Hae-in's affirmation and awe of life that has never been revealed in such a subtle way before.


Sister Lee Hae-in demonstrates the wisdom to find the right place of humility and modesty in the face of the truth of life's inevitability, and at the same time, as a poet who praises beauty and a devout religious nun, she longs for a refined and beautiful ending.


There are times when I suddenly get scared and worried that things might end differently from what I usually ideally wrote or said, but for now, I want to leave happily, just as I have lived happily up until now.
If I had to choose one wish as a monk before I die, it would be to have my vertical love for God and my horizontal love for my neighbors harmoniously blended, so that I could hear, "I have done a good job of carrying out the errand of love while living in this world."
I want to live each day seeking the generosity to not judge others based solely on their appearance, the faith to maintain a bright expression even in pain, and the wisdom to find gratitude in both good and bad things.
One day, even if I am so overcome with pain that I cannot speak, I will humbly confess with my whole body, 'Lord, have mercy!'
'I have been happy loving and being loved throughout my life.
I will say to my friends and the monastic community, 'Thank you for being so patient with my shortcomings.'

―From “Things I Want to Do Before I Receive God’s Calling”

Sister Hae-in Lee, who deeply moved many people with her pure poetic heart and refined lyricism.
Comforting poems that heal the hearts of all the sick people in the world.

Sister Hae-in Lee, who is loved by many for her friendly poetic themes based on daily life and nature, and her pure innocence and simple language born from her mother's faith, never loses her humility to maintain a low posture.
Sister Hae-in Lee, who recently said in a media interview, “I suffered and thought of each day as my entire life, so I saw people and nature in a new light.” She says that after her battle with illness, she came back from the brink of death and saw the sky, her family, the grass, trees, and flowers in a new light, and that she began to think positively about each day.
Through meditation on pain, he came to realize that suffering creates pearls, and his confession that he had learned the meaning of the phrase "pain is also a blessing," which he had previously understood abstractly, through his life, was fully captured in his poetry, and was sublimated into language that comforts the sick with a more earnest and heartfelt heart than before.
As you encounter these poems written with a pure heart and as if praying, at some point you will feel a deep sense of comfort and healing in your heart.


Living in the monastery, not a single day goes by that I don't pray, but my thirst for prayer is endless.
The prayer that never gets filled no matter how many times we say it, but always makes our hearts beat, is perhaps eternal love and longing.
My shame is endless, considering that I have not been able to pray as well as I have in years of experience in the capital.

―From ‘The Poet’s Words’

Sister Haein's poetry collection contains the prayerful heart of a mother.
Sister Haein shares with us the prayers of a mother whom we do not receive properly.
Sister Haein prays for our mothers.
This world is beautiful thanks to the sincere prayers of Sister Haein.
In the prayers of Sister Haein, the patterns of the human heart are splendid and tranquil.
Her prayer is a prayer of gratitude and a prayer of silence, a prayer of comfort and a prayer of tears, a prayer of love and a prayer of forgiveness, a prayer of humility and a prayer of being.
―Jeong Ho-seung (poet)

A total of 88 poems symbolizing Sister Hae-in Lee's laundry number 88
A love letter written with the hope that it will always be a comfort to my neighbors.

There are a total of 88 poems in 『Little Prayer』, and the number “88” also symbolizes the unique number 88 given to nuns when they enter the monastery (this is conveniently called a “laundry number” in the monastery).
This can be said to contain the poet's desire to dedicate this collection of poems to the monastic community that allowed him to write poems of prayer.
Sister Hae-in Lee, who says that poetry and monastic life have something in common in that they involve emptying the mind and moderation, believes that poetry is a prayer in symbolic language that expresses what a monk sees, experiences, and feels on the path of pilgrimage.
And he always hopes that it will be a beautiful love letter that brings small comfort to his neighbors, and he says that there is no greater joy than hearing confessions that after reading his poems, their hearts were purified or they felt a desire to live beautifully and kindly.
Because I feel like my poetry has wings and acts as an angel of healing and comfort.
The poet, who became a nun with the intention of doing good deeds and living a pure life, and who wrote poetry with a prayerful heart, deeply inscribing her unchanging meaning into each poem, will be able to feel this even more keenly in the new poems in 『Prayer of a Writer』.
Even now, Sister Hae-in's poems, which she responds to one by one to the countless people who send her their stories so that they do not lose love and hope, can be seen as a love letter to her readers, a fervent prayer for all people in the world, and the result of the spiritual enlightenment of a nun who leads the spirituality of this era.


The words in my heart that I couldn't express/in the world//After waking up/I forgot some of them/but I never wanted to forget/The most kind and beautiful dreams/The happy moments when I built a house of love/while laughing with strangers//I shed white blood inside/But I endured until the end/And became a flower/My pains that ripened into fruit//Whether alive or dead/I want to shout out/That you are my treasure//Because you're not that heavy/I definitely want to take you with me on my trip to heaven ―Full text from "A Certain Treasure"

People/sometimes/call me a mother of the heart//Thanks to the poems I gave birth to/They call me a mother/It's okay, but/Suddenly/I feel embarrassed and ashamed//I wonder if I can really be a mother/With my lack of sacrifice/I think I should be an aunt/But still/I really like the word mother/As a mother of the heart/I have to take good care of my heart ―Full text from "Mother of the Heart"