The spinning top—
still,
yet burning like the sun.

An open field
with roots layered
for a thousand years,
silent,
as if the earth itself
were waiting.

The sea did not cool—
it flared,
a mass of fire,
an ocean swallowing its own horizon.

Faces collapsed,
masks shattered,
falling into ocher clay.
Dust returning
to dust.

And he endured—
shouldering the dark-blue passion
of Mount Gamaksan,
a mountain that held its breath
until its veins
ran red.

Minutes,
seconds,
the fragile span between them—
time trembling
like a thread in the wind,
before,
after.

© Tae-Hun Yoon, After Ranger Training in 1973