I am burying myself

There are millions of reasons for us to stick with this poem. The most immediate reason is it is autumn now. In this autumn season, it is impossible not to understand the first line “Fall has fallen from the sky.”

The poem is contained in the last page of poet Lee Young-yu’s poetry book. The writer wrote the poem while suffering from cancer. When the poetry book was finally published, the poet was no longer surviving. If one figures out the situation, he or she will naturally understand why the poem ‘I am burying myself’ should be placed on the last page of his last poetry book.

A younger friend of him compiled Lee’s poems posthumously, and we can imagine what the friend would have felt while compiling. “I have never seen a person who have been destroyed as thoroughly as Lee Young-yu. He destroyed poems, destroyed life, and eventually the body. He is a loser,” the friend wrote in a commentary. In other words, Lee Young-yu was thoroughly and truly a poet. The commentary enables us to realize that the friend did truly love the late poet and cherished his poems.

On the day the loser’s life came to an end, he wrote such a poem. He only looked at things that looked so beautiful to his eyes. He piled up glaring, beautiful things and lay under them. Reading the poem, we naturally come to think: What is failure and what is success. Did we truly want a success?