Written by Grace Jung, Junior Researcher ’09-10
Miles of landscape, thousand-year-old trees by the Haeinsa temple
and deep wells, where the family drew water from years ago
before they installed indoor plumbing.
A sheet of purple fog stuck on the apex of three mountains, rising up ahead at the end of the highway, and the snow is settled over the ground,
just missing the black trees.
There’s ice in between rows and rows of dead fields where nothing grows, and empty blue-red houses, where the ducks are kept in the summer to labor as natural pesticides, swimming among rubber-booted farmers with their brown skins, getting darker every year.
Small white cars are driving past it all to get home or back or away from the February holiday.
It is the year of the Tiger.