Part 1 1980-1991
Thoughts on the Road 12 / Dandelion 13 / Even When You Are By My Side, I Miss You 14 / Magnolia 15 / Salt Doll 16 / Red Leaves 17 / October Dawn 18 / Mountain Fog 22 / Birds and Trees 23 / Two Days in September 24 / Birds Don't Look Back as They Fly 27 / Trees 28 / I Saw Many Snows 30 / Winter Clouds 32 / The Old Garden 35 / We Met Through Two Droplets of Water 36 / The Star of the Bug 39 / Some Snow 40 / November, Five Lines of Poem 42 / Sleeves Stained with Blood 43 / So Much Rain 44 / Walking in the Spring Rain 47 / Something of His Own 48 / Asking Regards to Sorrow 52 / Spider 54 / A Resume Dedicated to the Sun 56 / Poem Written on the Snow 58

Part 2 1992-1996
Salt 60 / Now is the time to close the shutters of longing 61 / Butterfly 62 / The love of a one-eyed fish 64 / Bread 65 / I plucked a mysterious flower 66 / Dianthus 68 / Nailing a star 69 / Plantain 70 / The tree 72 / Flower lamp 74 / For a moment on earth, it was called Ryu Si-hwa 75 / Birds come to our house and die 76 / A prologue for a traveler 78 / Water fog 81 / A song for sweet potatoes 82 / A poem about trees 85 / First love 86 / A short song 88 / Salt star 89 / To the flowers of the evening 90 / A prologue 91 / The bird of the Himalayas 92 / The hill on the other side 94 / That is not the wind 95 / Teaching a water rat to speak 96 / Write with blood 99 / Autumn will 100 / The memory of love is fading 102 / The phone To the Man Who Walks and Says Nothing 104 / A Winter's Tale 106

Part 3 1996-2012
At the Teahouse of the Wind 110 / Ongi 112 / Star in the Stone 113 / Somen 114 / Wintering in Saha Village 117 / Fireflies 122 / The Life of a Camel 124 / Blood-Stained Sleeves 43 / Mother 126 / Still in the Old Notebook 128 / The Icy Pond 131 / If the Poet Made a Dictionary 132 / Peony's Romance 134 / A Month in the Countryside 136 / Perfect Love 139 / The Death of the Gnat 140 / Letter from Darjeeling 143 / The River of First Love 144 / Barley 146 / Spring Opens and Closes Flowers 149 / Self-Portrait 150 / Being Alive Hurts 153 / Meditation on a Water Stone 154 / In the Most Beautiful Mood for Love 156 / When Spring Water Rises at the Edge of the Frozen Pond 158 / He A Good Person 160 / If I Do Laundry with Allen Ginsberg 162 / I Tracing the Place Where Flowers Bloomed 165 / Black Tea 166 / Like Taking Out the Flower I Had Locked Up Inside Me 169 / A Bear's Visit 170 / One Joy, a Thousand Sorrows 172 / I Think of a Flock of Blackbirds 174 / Seeing That I Wrote These Poems, I Must Have Loved Someone Back Then 176 / At the Age of Forty 178 / What the Moon Gae-bi Whispers to the Stars' Ears 180 / Courtesy to Those Who Have Stepped Away 182 / Poems That Readers Must Continue to Write 184 / Remembering with a Reindeer 187 / Turning Over, I Pour Out the Stars in My Ears 188

Commentary on the work | Poetry that makes you write poetry (Lee Moon-jae)

Introducing a collection of poems

As I compiled the poems from my three collections into one volume, I realized that the signals that flicker in my poetry are 'despair and hope,' or, as Pablo Neruda and Wisława Szymborska put it, 'questions that answer questions.'
Just as overlapping coincidences come together to form destiny, overlapping words come together to determine the fate of my poetry.
Life is wonderful, lonely, and hopelessly hopeless.
Meanwhile, the flowers are fading away, and the rain is putting us to sleep.

In the face of that paradox, each human being is a poet.
When asked by a reporter when he decided to become a poet, he replied, “Everyone born into this world is a poet.
The words of a poet who answered, “But we must ask each person when he stopped doing it,” are true.
It is a gift of this mysterious world that shakes and thrills language.

I wrote, 'Birds don't look back as they fly,' but I ended up looking back like this.
The title of every poet's last poem should be 'Goodbye Now'.
The meaning of a poem only comes to you after you read the last word.
Just as one realizes the meaning of the paths taken only after the journey is over.
The pain passes and a poem remains.
Until then, finding words is what it means to live as a poet.

My poetry may not offer solace in despair or answers to questions, but I am publishing a collection of poems after 35 years as a poet.
Reading poetry is synonymous with 'reading poetry'.
My poetry, which sometimes tries to use poetic techniques with noble words, has only the eyes and heart of the reader who 'reads the poetry' to rely on.
-Fall 2015, Ryu Si-hwa

Poetry that makes you write poetry

Poet Ryu Si-hwa is not prolific.
He published his first poetry collection more than 10 years after his debut, and his third poetry collection was published 15 years after his second.
For a poet with over 30 years of experience, he has published very few books of poetry.
If you follow the custom of publishing one book of poetry every three to four years, you should have around ten books of poetry.
If we agree that the three elements of creation are reading extensively, writing extensively, and producing extensively, then we can say that poet Ryu is lacking in one element.
But that's just talking without knowing much.
From what I have observed as a friend since the late 1970s, poet Ryu has several times more poems than he has published.
And those poems are not on paper, they are in his head.
He doesn't just write poetry on paper.
It is used in the wind and also placed on the clouds.
Because I spend more time on the road than at home.
He has “spent half his life on the road” since his late twenties ([In the Windy Teahouse]), and he has memorized all the poems he wrote on the road.
The poems written on the road were naturally stored in memory cells through the process of rewriting them countless times on the road.
So, Ryu Si-hwa's complete poetry collection has been growing in his mind for the past 30 years.
I don't know when that enormous collection of poems in my head will come out.

The process of editing an anthology is painful for the poet himself, but the anthology thus created is a blessing to the readers.
A poet writes 'one poem' throughout his life.
At this time, a poem is not a numerical concept.
A complete collection of poems, or anthology, can be a single poem.
A poem can be said to represent the values, meaning, or world that a poet pursues throughout his life.
However, although the poet himself may assert that one poem, the readers do not accept it as is.
A poem that encapsulates a poet's life and spiritual world is determined by the reader.
And the poem will be different for each reader, and the poem will also have new meaning each time the reader reads it.
That kind of poetry is good poetry.
A good poem is one that is renewed each time by the reader, one that is completed anew each time through an intimate conversation between the reader and the poem.
Here is the 'Poem of Poems'.
There are poems that have more readers than poets who have created them.
No, there is a poem that turns all readers into poets.
-From poet Lee Moon-jae's commentary