I must be off my road into the unreal,
For this is neither screen-lit, blue and bare,
Nor any rocket’s path through outer air.
It’s Phanar, where the Peter and the Andrew can stand
And look the whole round world in the same hand,
And in that lookout, something quietly grows—
A mind to lay down war, unclench the blows,
To stake on peace and common human right
What faith we have in living side by side.

The hours lean on my eyes with weight of news,
The steady drip of pictures, threaded views.
Last night a million wings came to my door.
I took them, and went walking shore to shore
Like some unsure-made angel overhead,
And saw the world as if it might be one.
Today the fiercer gift: I got the sun.
And all the split and scatter, noise and ash,
Broke like a hill of cinder in one flash.
What East and West once cracked in creed and vow
Seems mended now by what the heavens allow.

It happened on the Thanksgiving weekend of 2025,

So that day came, as quiet as a frost.
No single strongman, no loud pastor-bossed,
No backroom seer, no church that plays at charms,
Could quite lay hold on what fell in our arms.
It was a promise biding out of sight
All through this restless, wired, fluorescent age:
A climbing from the Krubera-like dark,
Up out of cave and into open air.

The old tales kept their counsel in the ground:
Cain and his brother, blood upon the field;
Ishmael and Isaac, parted, unreconciled;
Parents who could not love their twins the same,
Jacob and Esau, wrestling for a name;
Joseph turned by harm toward some new yield;
Moses called back from exile by a flame;
North against South, and walls of Zion down;
The march from chains toward a half-ruined town;
A kingdom sketched in hope along the way;
A road of rescue, rough with dust and stone;
Jesus and those who bore His name and strayed—
All this, and still a single prayer is made:

About 1,700 years later, since the council of Nicaea,

“Father, if you are in me, and I
Am somehow held in you, then let it be
That they find room together, you and me,
So that the watching world may learn belief.”

So I will take what lift the sky will give,
And fly in my slow fashion, as I live,
Toward that wide country, half in shade, half sun,
Where fellowship makes many faces one.

No more shut rooms for me:
No shaman’s den,
No humming screen-lit booth for boys at play,
No narrow testing cell, no rented song,
No bottle room to drink the night away,
No steel-locked panic space against the day.
I’ll take the homely door and go back through.
Home is the furthest place, and nearest too.

I mean to be one small, consenting star
Among the host that thickens heaven’s bar.
Even the far-off fires past what we can see
Keep house together in my chest for free—
All those uncounted lights, so far apart,
Fold down into one neighborhood of heart.

© TaeHun Yoon