I am a baby boomer.
In my youth, the war in Vietnam
cracked open the sky—
a far-off thunder
brought near by television light.

The Beat Generation
had already gone its road,
like smoke from a spent fire.
And after it came flowers—
the Hippie movement,
placing garlands
where rifles had been raised.

Then summer came
as if it meant to save us—
the Summer of Love.
I remember it less
for Woodstock’s distant field
than for the restless hum
inside the blood of youth.

Voices rose then:
Susan Sontag,
Allen Ginsberg—
sending peace
through the streets of San Francisco,
their words like narrow bridges
thrown across burning years.

And I am still humming
The Sound of Silence
by Simon & Garfunkel,
that old sorrowing tune
which taught us
how quiet can cry aloud.

And now another sixty thousand gather,
from the corners of this globe,
not with guns but light sticks:
the ARMY,
circling BTS in Tampa,
from Seoul on their world tour,
where the air itself
seems to tremble
with return and refrain.

Elsewhere, drums continue.
Conflict in Iran
opens and opens again,
without an end
the hand can hold.

Old songs come back—
Arirang—
bearing a people’s longing
over mountains of time,
now taken up
into the jetstream
of a worldwide chorus.

What wind is this
that gathers past and present
into one unfinished hymn?

No more should broken veterans
walk alone with haunted nights,
bearing the old accusation
of “baby killer”
like another wound.
Let mercy learn at last
what judgment never knew.

A seventy-seven-year-old man now asks,
Is it peace—
or only the echo
of our wanting,
thinned by distance,
and blown across the earth?

— TaeHun Yoon, April 26, 2026