© TaeHun Yoon, 1978

Beyond the stone wall,
in fields that once held vines,
only empty sacks remain—
their mouths gaping, waiting
for children who have not returned.

They waited.
And he, too, waited.

I had nothing.
Truly, for him,
there was no other desert.

Freedom cried out—
but hunger cried louder.

Now comes the most honest hour of day:
on the hill’s crest,
where a fisherman once cast his line
into the throat of night,
the ghosts begin to weep.

He watches light and shadow wrestle
at the rim of the sky,
and from that struggle,
he tells his fable of the world—
of those who sow,
and those who take,
and the earth that remembers both.

The seams of his skull split open,
and through the cracks
something thick and sweet as grass
poured in—
through brain and mouth and chest,
to the trembling tips of his toes.

Now everyone has gone.
Even the wind has learned silence.

I was truly hungry.

Author’s Note:

“Begging” was written in 1978, during a time when both body and spirit knew hunger.
It arose from the sight of people waiting—waiting not only for bread, but for justice, mercy, and a word from God.
In those fields of silence, I began to see that divine absence was not void, but a space where faith must learn to breathe.
The poem is a cry, yet also a prayer—one that asks where God dwells when the world turns away from the poor.
Through the language of emptiness and yearning, I sought to glimpse a sacred possibility:
that every hunger, if lifted toward heaven, might become an altar of hope and transformation.

Author Bio:

Tae-Hun Yoon is a Korean-born poet and retired United Methodist pastor living in Knoxville, Tennessee.
His poetry often explores the meeting ground between faith and social justice, memory and longing, silence and divine presence.
Through his work, Yoon seeks a language of transformation—where hunger becomes hope, and the human cry becomes a prayer.