“The Myth of Cades Cove”

The whispers move through Cades Cove’s folds,
Where Smoky ridges rise and breathe.
The old timber hums its tales of old—
Of roots that hold, of hearts beneath.

The streams, like silver threads unspooled
From every mile my life has crossed—
Ocean’s breadth and winding roads—
Slip through the meadows, dusk-renewed,
Their murmurs soft as prayers once lost,
A lullaby the hills re-sing.

Wildflowers lean—a humble choir—
While morning mist, a ghostly spire,
Lifts over what was once the golden age.
Their colors bow before the day,
Where silence teaches how to pray.

Here earth and soul move quietly,
Between the thin edge of the eternal
And the trembling instant of now.
Peace passes between them without a word;
Each whisper, each sigh becomes a friend—
The heart grows fluent in nature’s speech.

Rest in the quiet of Cades Cove,
Where the soft wind loosens blossoms
From the hand of the Creator.
Beauty—untamed, unmeasured—
Moves beyond the reach of thought,
And simple truth, sincere and bare,
Outshines every ornament.

Cades Cove gathers my wandering heart
And folds it into its thinning mist—
A slow and tender dripping of love
Flowing inward.

Note

In every season of my life, poetry has come to me like a quiet visitor—
sometimes in the stillness of dawn,
sometimes in the ache of memory,
and often in moments when the world felt thin enough for heaven to breathe through.

Cades Cove became such a place for me.
There, among the whispering ridges of the Smokies,
I felt the nearness of the Eternal and the tenderness of the earth.
The silence was not empty;
it carried stories older than my own,
and it invited me to listen with the heart, not the ears.

This poem grew out of that listening.
It is a testimony to the way nature heals,
the way solitude deepens the soul,
and the way grace touches us without insisting on being named.

If these lines bring even a moment of rest,
a breath of clarity,
or a whisper of gratitude to the reader,
then my journey through quiet places has found its companion.

— TaeHun Yoon