On Rosh Hashanah, wake-up calls by Shofar
the old year opens
its hidden door.

Along the road,
I hear no footsteps— only the breath of frost
moving through the trees.

Twenty-five years ago,
one morning,
the sky opened its wound.

I watched the Twin Towers
fall from the television screen, and for a moment
the earth itself
seemed to lose
its memory.

Thousands of souls
descended through the light, not left,
not right,
not man,
not woman,
not young,
not old,

but simply human— falling together
into the mystery
of dust.

How slowly
a life can disappear. A few seconds. A few days. And then
six feet beneath the earth, where even a name
becomes a whisper.

My mind became
a crystal bowl. Nothing moved inside it. No cry. No shout. Only a silence
too sacred
to break.

Perhaps grief
has no language. Perhaps the soul,
when struck by such darkness,
becomes transparent.

And from the dust
the crosses began to rise— millions of small lights, until the dead
were no longer beneath us

but above us, scattered through the night
like stars
remembering their names.

Since then,
9.11 has followed me
like a hidden sacrament, a holy mystery
along the winter road.

Every Rosh Hashanah,
I walk toward it again. The mist is gone. The warmth is gone. Only frost
touches the skin.

Yet beneath the frozen road,
something unseen
is still moving— a breath, a prayer, a thousand-year-old silence
becoming light.

And I wonder: perhaps the dead
did not fall from the towers. Perhaps
they fell through us, into the deepest place
where all human borders disappear— and became stars

so that we,
still walking, might never forget
how fragile
the light is.

Writing a poem

is not writing.

It is waiting

without waiting.

Let thought fall away.

Let yourself fall away.

Enter emptiness.

Noise becomes rhythm.

Rhythm becomes seeing.

One thing.

Only one.

The world gathers

into a single word—

flies, returns,

becomes meaning.

In the stillness,

I lose myself.

Then finally,

I am myself.

The poem flows out.

I simply follow.

No more in or out

– 이 세형 박사의 백두 천지 기행을 보고

한라의 백록담

백두의 천지

아,

그리운 나의 강산

그렇지

아무렴 구름과 바람이 되어

우리의 소원 어디에 있든

마침내 자유되리

오가는 단군의 얼

모두 사물로 어우러져

사당패의 장단처럼

한마당으로 살아가리

얼쑤

(- voice of Esq. Kyung-ho Kim)

I call the names of those who rose—
from furrows, from hunger, from the dust of the earth—
the people who learned that a human being is heaven
and stood upright with that sky in their chests.

I call Suun,
who split the world with one sentence
and made the lowly tall.

I call the farmers of 1894,
burning the chains,
lifting bamboo spears like lightning,
walking into the iron storm
with nothing but equality for armor.

I call Ugeumchi—
the great falling,
the red field,
the thunder of thirty thousand souls
whose breath rose again
in 3·1,
in 4·19,
in 5·18,
in the candles that lit the night,
in every cry that says
the people are the root of the nation.

I call the forgotten ones,
the mislabeled ones,
the descendants who carried shame
that was never theirs.

I call the reckoning—
the day the nation will say:
We remember you.
We honor you.
We rise because you rose.

동학 is not past.
동학 is the fire under our Constitution,
the sky inside our breath,
the thunder still walking the land.