POETIC DELIGHTS BY SIYOUNG DOUNG-KOERA

1-Between the Twilight and the Sound of the Violin

At the border of Croatia and Serbia,

The Pannonian Plain lays out a new map.

Mountains emerge, opening roads and blocking them

Mountains are always the masters of the grandest paths.

Are you on some errand?

The Danube River

Slips out of the city

Between the light of twilight and the sound of the violin.

A day, vanishing so as not to disappear,

Crosses the mountain’s waist like a lazy thought.

Someone,

Like a gently touched giant clam,

Closes the door on the day.

2-Like a Single Word

The sky and the earth are the lips of eternity.

There,

we live like a single word.

Like a ring worn without knowing

whose hand placed it,

people live, fitted into the world.

Today,

I do not know where I am.

Just standing—

Hands engraving handprints,

feet engraving footprints.

Life is finding a path in the void.

Birds know

that the void is eternity.

Living is the breaking of one boundary after another.

Life grows colder as it goes on.

The time they wrote

abandons them in the end.

3-After the Typhoon

Like the flesh of words,

The boulders and mounds

Invaded.

It seems the mountains,

The wounds humans have inflicted,

Have begun to heal.

Action is the master.

Nature speaks in silence.

The warmth of humanity

Is, in fact,

Embedded in nature.

The sky, shattered like a broken screen,

Hangs suspended, teetering on the edge of collapse.

AUTHOR:

SIYOUNG DOUNG-KOERA

Dr. Siyoung Doung graduated from the Department of Korean Language and Literature at

Dongguk University and earned a Ph.D. in Korean Language and Literature from Hanyang

University. She further expanded her academic pursuits by studying humanities at

Regensburg University in Germany. Her teaching career includes positions as a professor at

Korea Tourism University in Korea and Jilin University of Finance and Economics in China.

Her literary journey began in 2003 with her poetry debut in the literary magazine Dacheung.

Since then, she has published numerous poetry collections, including Future Hunting, In

Search of a Strange God, The Phone Call from God, The Eyes of November, The

Carnival of Time (Anthology), Was It You, Was It Me, or Was It Longing?, The

Scent of Secrets, Aria of Everyday Life, The River Flowing Under the Pen, The

Magic Letters, and The Horizon Never Gets Wet. In addition to poetry, Doung has

contributed significantly to literary research with works such as Roh Cheon-myung’s

Poetry and Semiotics, Korean Literature and Semiotics, and Semiotics of Modern

Poetry. Her exploration of literature extends into travel writing, with essay collections like

Encountering Culture Through Travel and Encountering Travel Through Literature.

Her literary excellence has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, including the

Park Hwa-mok Literary Award (2010), Poetry and Poetics Young Poet Award (2011), the

Grand Prize at the Korean Buddhist Literature Awards (2018), the 32nd Dongguk Literary

Award (2019), the Yeongrang Literary Award for Criticism (2020), and the 7th Woltan Park

Jong-hwa Literary Award by the Korean Writers’ Association (2021). Most recently, she

received the Literary Youth Work Award in 2024. In recognition of her contributions to

literature, she was also a recipient of a creative grant from the Arts Council Korea in 2005.

Dr. Doung is currently the President of the Korean Association of World Literature and lives

in Seoul with her husband, a former university professor.