© TaeHun Yoon

(A Lament for Departing Love – 1980/2025)

The cloud divides—silently—
above the roofs that forgot how to shine.
Its voyage ends in a breath of frost
as the sun folds itself into the dim seam of day.

Is anyone there?
Come in—
no, stay—
no, go.
The room has no space for returning.

To forget you,
I kneel to the earth,
press my face into the hush of indifferent sand.
I give myself away—
to dust, to echo, to whatever still listens.

Thunder returns,
measured and slow,
as if the sky itself remembers our names
and drops them, one by one, into the rain.

In the courtyard
where the stars once washed their feet,
you wept—
a fragile sound, like torn silk,
like memory loosening from cold hands.

And so—
we end.
Not with rage,
but in the soft unmaking
of a cloud separated from its own reflection.