© TaeHun Yoon, 1979

• The Suffering and the Rising

A black serpent wore the weight of a week’s rebirth around its neck.
It had been struck, cast into the stillness of the wild.

The ground ran red with blood,
and the city reeked of burning flesh and spilled life.

On the second day, and the third,
bodies turned over in the fields, in the dust.
Then the trumpet spoke:

“I do not feast as you do—
we worship with the heart.”

The sky trembled—
like a serpent wounded in its shining.

But from heaven came a breath of light,
and the dead were given back their air.

The crows became white birds,
flying toward the river of awakening.

They moved as if rising from death,
the wind whispering, the water gleaming like gold.

Beneath the river stood two mothers—
not of flesh, but of love, memory, promise, and power.

The earth burned, the mountains melted,
yet from the fire came a newborn light.

At dawn, the rooster cried—
and all began again.
Everything turned to brightness;
the dead rose with the morning.

Stone, water, people, reeds, and river
were remade in glory.

The trumpet sounded anew,
and wings spread across the sky.

What he heard
was the breaking of waves within him—
the flutter of holy wings.

He opened his eyes.

The bird flew high.
One beam of light remained.

“I am risen. I have come.”

– Author’s Note

This poem is a meditation on resurrection—on the passage of the soul through suffering into renewal.
The black serpent that bears the weight of a week’s rebirth is a sign of human pain, yet also of the hidden work of grace within silence.
Fire, water, earth, and sky become symbols of divine transformation,
where destruction and creation breathe the same breath.

Resurrection, in this sense, is not an event of the body alone,
but a reawakening of the heart—
light found within darkness,
peace drawn from pain.

Thus, the poem seeks to reveal that death is not the end,
but a threshold where the light of God begins again.