Toward Palm Sunday

One morning
I stood before the mirror—

and something small,
almost nothing,
unsettled me:

my left hand
had become the right,
my right the left.

If the mirror were faithful to the end,
my feet would rise upward,
my head hang down
like a lantern in still air.

Everything reversed—
and yet,
everything true.

—

Then I knew:

the mystery was never
in the glass,
nor in the science of light,

but in the trembling behind it—
life
recognizing itself
within me.

—

From childhood,
one memory remained:

a dark theater,
a double feature—

“E lucevan le stelle”
opening like a wound
in my young chest,

and the quiet drifting
of La Strada,
awakening a loneliness
I could not yet name.

—

Later—
songs came:

John Denver
passing like open sky,
Neil Diamond
holding the heart in steady hands.

And deeper still—
a clearing:

Henry David Thoreau,
and behind him,
like a wind that does not fail,
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

—

I saw a man
walking a quiet road—

something alive within him,
spring rising in thought,
words budding,
sentences forming
like branches toward light.

—

Year after year—

leaves, flowers,
storms and lightning,
hatred and love—

all passing through,
beyond science,
beyond philosophy,
beyond theology—

into something
that simply is.

—

And when the burden
of small necessities loosened—

when the anxious counting
fell away—

I arrived,

if only for a moment,
at a stillness
that felt like eternity.

No movement needed.
No striving required.

For I had become
the flow.

—

I watched Daniel Barenboim—
conducting not with hands alone,
but with breath,
with being—

the Staatsoper Berlin,
the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
moving as one body.

And Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth—
rising,
circle within circle,
from memory,
from sweat,
from the trembling of human hands
reaching toward beauty.

—

And Leonard Bernstein—
fire in motion—

bearing Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
like a living flame,
holding sound and silence
at the edge
of the unspeakable.

—

No more wandering the road.
No more searching.

On this turning—
this quiet entrance
beneath unseen branches—

I understand:

the mirror does not deceive.

It prepares.

For what is reversed
is restored,
what is lowered
is lifted,
what is lost
enters the city unseen.

—

Ah—

I am not on the road.

I am the road.

— TaeHun Yoon, March 28, 2026