“…natty as a Beau…He sate him down, in London town,”
                                                                                                         —Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1812

The Devil is an agriculturalist

of event horizons,

a witness to the failure

of even light’s escape velocity,

what chance have Earth’s foundlings,

entire orphanages consumed

by Old Nick the cattle driver,

herding his echoing beasts

over the basalt plains

of lunar maria—

He breaks his fast

skips a split-lip supper,

to clang the bell

of his widow’s shadow,

what a famine, this stockyard,

a free fall,

cast from darkness—

deep time, a lucid

starvation of gravity,

but loose, a kind of pendulum

in God’s ear, a hollow

mangled ringing. 

*The Devil’s Walk: A Ballad is one of three poems that I wrote recently inspired by my reading about Korean Catholic martyrs in the years 1791-1866, which fall within the Joseon Dynasty.

Sun Yung Shin is an award-winning Korean-born poet and writer based in Minneapolis. Her most recent books are The Wet Hex and What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family. With poet Su Hwang she is the co-founder of Poetry Asylum and is a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and elsewhere. More at sunyungshin.com