Midwinter sunlight—thin and thirsty—leans into the snow, as if lost in a dream, murmuring long tales of a weary army dragging itself from the edge of a forgotten homeland.

From afar, it looks like an angel—
a fierce, burning flame.
I scoop up ash in my hand
and breathe in its scent—
a memory of soil I once called mine.

The universe passes before me.
But first,
this world must turn to ash.

Above a small red anemone blooming at my feet,
a flame rises—
uneasy, still—
an angel named Silence.

Its body,
sun-scorched skin
draped over carved bones,
as if the rock itself
had suddenly bloomed with flowers.

Tongues of fire lick the trees.
The house folds inward from all sides
until its walls press against my ribs.

Food, joy, safety—
beneath me,
countless mouths cling to the breast of the earth,
suckling.

The ground trembles.
It is the sound of spring.

But hearing—
has already fallen silent.

– Note:

This poem was written in the shadow of winter, but its true subject is the disorientation and quiet violence of starting over. After immigrating to the United States, I found myself surrounded by unfamiliar landscapes, new languages, and the slow unraveling of everything I once called home. “Sunlight” is not a celebration of arrival—it is a meditation on the cost of transformation.

The burning angel, the trembling ground, the house folding inward—these are not metaphors of destruction alone, but of rebirth through surrender. The poem’s imagery reflects the paradox of immigration: the need to let go of one world in order to survive in another, even as memory clings like ash to the skin.

The red anemone blooming beneath the speaker’s feet is a fragile sign of life, a reminder that spring can emerge even from scorched earth. But the final line—“hearing had already collapsed”—speaks to the exhaustion of adaptation, the silence that follows too much change.

In writing this, I did not seek resolution. I sought to honor the quiet, elemental truth of beginning again: that even in a new land, the body remembers what it lost, and the soul listens for the sound of spring.

© TaeHun Yoon, 1982