Cow eyes
Those dull vacant eyes
My grandmother’s eyes.
My grandmother!
The most sacred person in the world to me.
A cow that has stopped grazing the fresh grass
And is just standing there.
But she is not my grandmother after all:
Rather, this world’s peace,
Dead and denied a tomb.
(Ko Un was born in Korea in 1933. Ten Thousand Lives, the collection where this poem appears, is his major work with a determination to describe every person he had ever met. The collection is a part of the first ten volumes edited by Per Bregne, published in 2005.