To ask is to wound again.
So the question remains unasked,
settled somewhere between the tongue and the heart.

When did forgetting begin?
Was it thirty—
or only the illusion of forgetting,
the face receding, not erased
but waiting in another room of the mind?

I have walked new roads,
learned the discipline of looking away—
the inherited thorns,
the claims of blood.
Half a life has passed
without announcement.

I tell myself I am ready
to lay it down,
to rest.

Yet the soul refuses such economy.

For there is the mother
who buried her future
before the earth received her.
A child more costly than breath,
gone first.

Where does such grief go?
Not into memory,
not into time.

Where, then,
does spring arrive
for a soul held in frost?

If light comes,
it will not announce itself.
It will fall quietly,
from nowhere we can name.

— TaeHun Yoon