LTI Korea 
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Two Poems by Lee Silbi scrap
by Lee Silbi
Translated by Jack Saebyok Jung
June 9, 2026
Author Bio 작가 소개
Lee Silbi
Lee Silbi is the author of the poetry collection Misunderstandings and the Afternoon Sun.
Tempering
People board the cruise ship one by one.
Each stands holding a mirror.
I see only my own face.
You see only your own face
as we cross the sea.
What the ship carries is corn.
By the time the people have eaten all the corn,
the cruise ship arrives at the Domino Kingdom, built from corncobs.
The place reeks of saliva. For the lovers who bit and sucked at each other,
from now on, every object in the world will look like a wooden club to them.
And yet,
feeling as though your whole body has been beaten is not the same as actually being beaten, so the lovers endure.
At the dock,
one person remains.
He watches steam rising from the hot sea.
Now and then, he thought he wanted to love.
A wish that shakes his whole body, afraid it might leap out through his breathing hole, he holds his breath
and quietly eats his corn,
while a seagull circles overhead, scheming to snatch his wish away.
Sea slaters swarm over an abandoned slipper. Inching its way between the breakwaters before vanishing,
the orange sunset
cools the waves.
Children gathering shells covet each other’s finds, then shove each other.
The one who didn’t board the cruise ship
has never broken anyone else’s bones, has lived breaking only his own,
but the children pointed fingers.
He has no care at all for other people, they said.
Other people? Caring? He wants to know what he does not know, and wants to go on not knowing what he does not know, and diligently tears apart his corn.
He dips the cob, stripped clean, into the seawater.
It dissolves and disappears.
Damage
Holding a broken hourglass, you came. Life is too short, you said, having sought me out. A night when white and red grains of sand tumble down quarreling, pencil lead began to grow from your shoulders.
In the hours the lead pushed through, sharp and pointed,
you were in pain. Rolling on the floor, you scored long dark lines across the boards. Because I couldn’t ask you to wait, because there was no time to wait, I pressed a large sheet of paper to your shoulder and rubbed. As long as I kept rubbing,
no new lead rose to replace it. I’ll give you paper from now on, every day. Good paper.
If I thought I was enduring it for one person,
the night is long—
It is an act of believing that black lines filling the paper will be enough to fill the night.
Even so,
I didn’t say let’s get used to this,
didn’t tell the one who grabs my shoulder and rolls with me about the joy of holding out through the night.
Because new drawings to be drawn and new poems to be written come in the morning. Because some music must be heard at high noon to be truly shocking. Because shock must be left to flow.
I shattered the hourglass and spilled the sand.
A mountain scattered with white and red sand—
From a distance, it looks pink. Do you find that romantic? Picture you and me, very small, climbing that mountain. With every step, pink cascades down in a rush. The very last grain of sand to fall at the foot of the mountain, will it be white? Or red? We agree to wonder about that until morning.
Translator 번역가 소개
Jack Saebyok Jung
Jack Saebyok Jung is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and the author of Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus (Black Square Editions, 2025). A Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he co-translated Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), winner of the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work. His next book of translation, Kim Hyesoon’s Lady No, will be published by Ecco in 2026. He teaches at Davidson College.
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