Monologue for an Onion
I don't mean to make you cry.
I mean nothing, but this has not kept you
From peeling away my body, layer by layer,
The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills
With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of pursuit.
Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.
Hunt all you want. Beneath each skin of mine
Lies another skin: I am pure onion--pure union
Of outside and in, surface and secret core.
Look at you, chopping and weeping. Idiot.
Is this the way you go through life, your mind
A stopless knife, driven by your fantasy of truth,
Of lasting union--slashing away skin after skin
From things, ruin and tears your only signs
Of progress? Enough is enough.
You must not grieve that the world is glimpsed
Through veils. How else can it be seen?
How will you rip away the veil of the eye, the veil
That you are, you who want to grasp the heart
Of things, hungry to know where meaning
Lies. Taste what you hold in your hands: onion-juice,
Yellow peels, my stinging shreds. You are the one
In pieces. Whatever you meant to love, in meaning to
You changed yourself: you are not who you are,
Your soul cut moment to moment by a blade
Of fresh desire, the ground sown with abandoned skins.
And at your inmost circle, what? A core that is
Not one. Poor fool, you are divided at the heart,
Lost in its maze of chambers, blood, and love,
A heart that will one day beat you to death.
I don’t intend that you shed tears. Actually, I am not doing anything on purpose and I am nobody. But you continue to strip my skin and remove my layers. While small pieces of my layers, the remnants you leave behind when you are struggling to find my heart, are placed on the table, tears well up in your eyes and dim your eyesight. (Isn’t what you deserve?) People are misled and trying foolishly to look for my center. What a pity! Go ahead and search what you really desire. However, I am only an onion. I am nothing more than just simple layers exterior and interior. I am just a structure of sheets joining together from outside to inside. Look at you, the fool, you are cutting (me) and crying (for yourself). Are you leading your life by this approach, which you obstinately try to find imaginary hidden significance, which doesn’t exist at all? In order to figure out the fabricated fact, your intelligence works like a blade and peels off from the surface of matters relentlessly. You separate the unity which is supposed to be together. But you end up with only destroys, disappointments and frustration. This must stop. Don’t be depressed for the fact that everything is concealed under a cover. It is what the world really is. Even your eyes and yourself are limited or covered by something you might not sense. So you might not satisfy yourself for the true meaning or figure out where the false is. What you hold now are pungent bits of my flesh. They smell bad and they are useless. However, you are the one who is in fact torn bit by bit in heart. No matter what purpose you have in life, you are different now. The new illusions of attempting to search truth are like knives to hurt your soul, leaving you nothing but something like stinging pieces of onion. You have a heart at the center of your body. But you are such an idiot. While you are trying to find my core, your heart is dissected. You are bewildered in the sophistication of the heart’s structure. You lose yourself and your life. The truth you are trying to find will someday lead you to your end.
Ms. Kim’s poem “Monologue for an onion” illustrated a person who was chopping and peeling an onion and trying to find its heart. The theme of the poem is that people refuse to accept the simplicity of the fact but desire to figure out the hidden significance or truth, which may not exist, like the core of the onion. In the process of seeking, people actually get lost and hurt. Ms. Kim picked up the words carefully to vividly depict the feeling of the onion and the person as well. The onion is being tortured and yet the onion is preaching or mocking the person.
No wonder your English is so good. It could be attributed to your good memory. I do believe memorizing is one of the best ways to learn English.
Don’t know much about poetry, but the analogy used in the poem reminds me of an old English saying, which goes: living a life is just like the process of peeling an onion: it’s all the same layer after layer until you get to the core, where nothing else by the essence is expected to be revealed. Yet, it is found still the same – just another layer of the onion.
Have a great weekend!