As the war generation grows older, casting glances back on life, poetry of witness has become increasingly urgent. Perhaps time and distance have brought freedom, or a desire to delve into the past and express one's history as a way of both lessening and sharing the burden.
One can't help but feel the weight of history when reading Chong Ki-Sheok's "Black Flower in the Sky," a series of poems that maps Chong's journey as a forced Korean laborer in wartime Japan and back again.
Chong Ki-Sheok was born in southern Korea in 1923 and studied at Yahata Middle School in Fukuoka from 1935 to 1940. He came to Japan as a kind of exchange student, in much the way a student might go to the United States to study English today. In 1943, he was brought back to Japan as a forced laborer, and worked at a rayon factory in Ujina, near Hiroshima.