1965 — a life offered in stillness.

Beneath the sun of that year,
under a barren, overheated light,
chased, broken by hunger,
falling, fluttering—
a certain motion—

(Was it memory, or repetition?)

Unable to leap into today,
with ankles held fast,
I wander through a vermilion dusk—
an evening that never arrives.

Fluttering—only that—
a gesture before it finds meaning,
a trembling before it is named.

The price to be paid in place of a person
is cast into the empty air of the future—
(who will gather it?)

Beyond the horizon—
though I say there is no end,
I imagine one:
another self of mine there—
waiting,
or already gone.

And that day—
when waves, like beasts with voices,
were shouting—

I turned away from the struggle
and lost what I had held.

Was it wings,
or merely
something I believed were wings?

What remains
is regret,
and the struggle of language—

words cannot reach,
and silence deepens.

On the sandy plain,
once again,
emptiness rises like a flag
and flutters toward the void.

(a signal no one reads)

And I ask—
this one life—
has it already been offered,
or is it still
a sacrifice delayed?

—TaeHun Yoon
(Reedited my first poem ever written at age sixteen, in the most desolate days,
the year Korean troops were dispatched to Vietnam)