I am a baby boomer, and I go on—yes, go on—
dreaming of one clear day without war,
a day when no nation hardens steel for harm,
when no child wakes to sirens in the dawn,
when maps are not corrected by fire.

I remember my youth, and it remembers me—
the war in Vietnam breaking open the sky,
a far-off thunder made near
by the flicker of a television screen,
where boys went out and silence came back.

The Beat voices had already taken the road,
their words thinning like smoke in the air,
and after them came flowers—
the Hippies, gentle-handed,
laying garlands where rifles had been.

That summer came as if it meant to save us—
the Summer of Love—
not only in fields far away,
but in the quickened pulse of the young,
believing the world might yet be mended by song.

Voices rose then and still return—
sharp, searching, unafraid—
words cast out like narrow bridges
over years already burning.

And I, older now, still find myself humming
that quiet song of sorrow,
learning again how silence speaks,
how stillness carries its own cry.

Now look—another gathering forms:
not armies, but people,
not weapons, but light in their hands,
small constellations lifted into the night,
the young making one body of song.

Yet elsewhere, always elsewhere,
the drums do not cease.
The wound of the world opens again,
refusing its closing,
time circling back on its own unrest.

Old songs return—
songs that have crossed mountains and years,
carrying longing without end,
rising again into the wide air,
joining a chorus larger than memory.

What wind is this that moves among us?
What gathers the living and the dead,
the cry and the hymn,
the prayer and the whisper,
into one unfinished music?

No more should the broken walk alone,
bearing names they did not choose,
carrying wounds spoken by others.
Let mercy learn, at last,
what judgment never knew.

And I—seventy-seven years carried in this body—
ask plainly:
Is it peace that comes,
or only the echo of longing,
thin as smoke, crossing the earth?

Still, I do not stop.

I sing what I have heard and hoped—
that music may gather the scattered,
that voices may make a place to belong,
that even now something rises
we have not yet learned to name.

I sing of a world imagined whole:
no borders drawn in hatred,
no hunger marching,
no child taught fear.

I sing one human choir,
breathing together,
sharing the earth beneath a kinder sky.

I sing the old who still hope,
the young who still gather,
the grieving, the dancing,
the doubting, the believing—

all who lift even one small note
against war.

For no note of peace, however faint,
is ever lost.

It enters me.
It stays.

And I know now—
I am not only the singer.

I am, in part,
the song.

— TaeHun Yoon, April 26, 2026 (Revised on 5/3/2026)