It’s June 25. The Korean War Day. It reminds me of many things including Battle of Dabudong, Nakdonggang River of General Paik Sunyup I recently met. Countless poems about Korean War by my mother are one of them, too.
She fled to Busan and went through all sorts of hardship living in a storehouse of her acquaintance. Yet the biggest hardship was, my mother writes, being unable to write down her ideas for a poem as she had no access to a paper or a pen for 3 years.
I also heard that after she got married with my father, a civil worker at the Commerce Industry Ministry who moved from Pyongyang after she returned from studying in Tokyo and teaching Home Economics at Muhak Girls’ High School in Seoul, the Korean war broke out. She went to Choryang with her parents, her hair fell out because she had to place things on her head while moving, I heard.
The cold in the winter would have been piercing without firewood and my grandfather who had graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo was kidnapped in the panic of war without anything to eat. She wrote many of her poems about waiting for her dad every day in an alley, as people came back from war but her father was nowhere to be seen among them.
I had dinner with dad without knowledge of its being the last time under the dark light of blackout
Refugees return in a row, yet I miss the one person that doesn’t come back, my father
I also remember my father recalling hiding in bomb shelter when raided and the Communist Chinese soldiers shooting into the inside and dead bodies pouring down.
Perhaps the panic of war my mother experienced in her twenties was ingrained in her. She didn’t usually say something about it, yet when I decided to come back to Korea from the U.S. 20 years ago, she carefully suggested “why don’t you stay in the country with no war?” I confidently replied “There's not going to be any war ” and returned to Korea. Yet, facing the current situations, the words of my late mother weigh heavily on me.
The moon shines through wrinkles in a violet skirt hung to shut out the drought These lines which seem romantic at a first glance were from one of my mother’s favorite poems, my mother once said.
The room would have been ice-cold without firewood, and a piece of skirt would have been hung to shut out the cold wind coming through a chink in the door, and in the gap, the moonlight would have been plaintively shining down with no regard to earthly things like war; the moonlight would have been seen by the eyes of sentimental poet amid the war, yet looking at the behind story, it sure is not romantic.
I’d lived far away from my mom with the Pacific Ocean keeping us apart. I didn’t have an opportunity to hear about the background or meanings of my mother’s poems, yet this was the only case I did. Someone asked her which her favorite was among 3000 poems that she wrote.
'Sharing the same ancestors holding a weapon at the 38th parallel border'
'Endless history of rise and fall and the 38th parallel would be added to it'
'No one compensates for division, the deep scar of our people would be left to history'
'The cause for our unrest saddens me'
'My happiness is linked to the fate of my home country and I pray ardently'
These five lines of my mother’s 6.25 tanka are included in Showa Manyoshu.
This poem would not have been out in the world had it not been for the Korean war.
Greeting June 25 in 2019, I hope my mother’s words would be wrong – remembering the cruelty of war, she told me not to come back hoping her daughter would be able to avoid war. My mother has never been wrong so far, though.
'It was unusually cold that year without firewood I slept all curdled up holding you in the cold ondol room'
The calamity of war gave birth to a love song like this. 
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