나무 유령

Tree ghost

Namu Eurong, erong namu

A tree does not migrate.

It moves outward, under and above,

Or side to side, or twists

harvesting sun,

Or is pushed by the wake of an element,

But stays rooted often into death.

A tree is not literate, has no need to observe and record

the babble of vibrations marking political borders

and transitory entities.

A tree will tend to its progeny through

networks of mycelium,

but even an ocean impedes such contact.

A tree may cross an ocean, as a seed

in the belly of a bird,

Or as a sapling, or mostly grown, they may be

Uprooted,

and carried in the cavity of a ship, to be replanted.

Perhaps seed, perhaps sapling,

to my ancestors, I am a ghost.

My visage haunts hospitals, and not quite forgotten orphan homes,

And modern city streets, on a continent I no longer inhabit,

where memory in my DNA lights up among the population

tiny centimorgans,

spark and crackle like a bioluminescent sea of far distant relations,

me of them, they of me.

A seed grown, taken from one soil, planted in another.

Not a tree

Not a ghost

나무 유령, Namu Eurong