by TaeHun Yoon, 3/4/2026

Between the wires
(where current hums without memory)
a paulownia stood—
too near the measured lines of power.

It fell.

The stump was burned.
Fire entered the marrow
and left a hollow—
a dark mouth in the earth
breathing smoke long after flame.

Years accumulated.
The place grew unsightly,
a scar without explanation.
So flowers were planted—
small defiances of color
around a charred circumference.

Along the boundary—
four hundred yards of division—
fifteen elders were taken down
for the high voltage.
Seventy rings each.
Fifty feet of weather.

Cut.
Burned.
The fire descended.

Not upward into spectacle,
but downward—
into secrecy.

Roots, thick as history,
refused surrender.
Weeks of excavation:
pulley and shovel,
pickaxe and breath.
We descended past stature,
past certainty.

Three feet below—
a living filament:
passion still green
in the underworld.

Thus the soil relearned itself.
Ash became loam.
The ruined ground
prepared again for seed.

And memory turned.

Once, in another forest,
I walked with Henry David Thoreau
beside still water—
learning the arithmetic of simplicity,
the moral grammar of pine and pond.

Once, beneath a vaster sky,
I listened with Wilhelm Reich
for the pulse between breath and cloud—
body and ether
held in one invisible field.

All things rooted.
All things breathing one breath.

Another root surfaced—
buried in exile:
Gao Xianzhi,
descendant of a fallen kingdom,
carried west when Goguryeo collapsed.

Across ice passes in 747—
Darkot, the Pamirs—
a thousand horsemen,
each with two horses,
ascending where air thins to doubt.

Centuries later
Aurel Stein
named that desolation Innermost Asia.
Others named the general
King of the Mountains.

History travels underground.
It does not announce itself
with trumpets.
It endures in roots
waiting the thaw.

Sometimes the individual diminishes—
ash among ashes.
Sometimes the individual stands
at the still point
around which the age revolves.

Conscience is subterranean fire.
No government decree
extinguishes it.

Beneath this Smoky Mountain clay
(a mere two feet down)
a mountain waits.

Easter approaches—
not with spectacle
but with pressure.

Passion will rise through soil.
Stone will loosen.
What was buried
will breathe again.

And the mountain ballad—
long muted—
will return
in another key.