— Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater

He was twenty-six
and already close to the end.
So he turned his prayer
toward the mother who had lost her son,
standing where grief must stand—
beneath the cross,
where music learns how to speak softly.

Others had walked that road before him—
Bach, and those who knew
the long dusk of faith,
when belief survives
by keeping its balance.

The world was already splitting—
care for the flesh
set against the need to endure.
That is where wars begin:
not with shouting,
but with confusion,
with councils that cannot agree
on what peace costs.

Walls rose everywhere—
inside and out.
One side called itself freedom,
the other order.
Money moved, weapons followed,
laws were written and rewritten.
Still the old question stayed:
Where is peace?
What keeps it?

Every war is wrong,
yet each one claims necessity.
So we store more arms,
hoping they will save us—
a sorrow that keeps singing
but never finds its end.

It feels as if the old serpent
finally broke the box open,
letting loose what crawls and bites.
Pain spreads without limit now,
and healing seems
like a forgotten skill.

The world grows rough—
quick hands, short faith,
no patience for repair.
Some call it a new order,
even a new god.
Still, even there,
patterns remain—
a kind of beauty,
a rule not yet erased.

Between heaven cut off
and earth worn thin,
“Han” settles in the chest—
a grief that won’t be talked away.
And yet, in that dark place,
another word appears:
living together,
growing together,
not alone.

A small light reaches the ground.
Someone lifts cold water from a well
and drinks without shame,
under the open sky.
A pole is raised.
A bird comes down.
Another waits on distant peaks.
Something begins again.

Slowly, the world opens—
as if heaven leans closer,
as if earth remembers
what it was meant to be.

Bach.
Dvořák.
Their music waits beneath the cross,
where loss is deepest.
And there, quietly,
“Han” turns—
not into answers,
but into praise.

Ah—
such a hard beauty,
and still,
beauty.

— Tae-Hun Yoon