Classic Poem

One star already out, the world's the cosmos now.
In the village it's the season of the smell of dried grass,
here and there the light of sparingly used lamps shines out.
As I make my way home across the rice fields at nightfall,
sometimes brushing away the invasive insects,
I remember old Namdong who was laid to rest yesterday.
It's as if death makes our hearts grow deeper;
I must change a bit from what I was when the old man was alive.
I keep looking back at the rice fields, more lovely than ever
in the darkness.
More blasted by mildew than last year:
how much work and affection it must have
consumed.
Demanding eighty-eight times the hand's intervention,
isn't that one-year farming?
In autumn, no matter how poor the rice harvest,
how big the debts,
in autumn the poker too must be busy at work as autumn demands.
No thought at all of leaving here, no thought of rest.
As life goes on, time is not such a big thing to people,
it's the smallest thing for all of us.
On the way home, the evening field-path is today sublimely still.
After growing tall in drought, in late monsoons,
despite mildews and blight,
what is the rice to us if not adult,
after it has so silently put out ears?
Quick, let's be off, and with our bodies stinking of loam
once lift up our kids, holding them high in the dark,
then put them down as one nation, at least.