Strange—yes, I say it plainly—strange,
after the modest praise, the brief warm clasp of voices,
after the book has gone out from me, wandering among strangers,
resting on shelves I shall never see—
there comes no fullness, no harvest gathered in—
but a thinning, a loosening, a widening of air.

I feel what I held begin to unfasten—
ideas once near as breath now drifting above me,
half-shaped, half-willing,
like waves that speak but never arrive,
like a sea I hear but cannot reach.

O mind! you grow heavy not with loss alone,
but with the failing of your own keeping—
you cannot hold, you cannot secure,
and so a quiet fear enters, unannounced—
names loosening their grip, rooms turning unfamiliar,
days mislaid like letters without address.

Evening receives me.
I go to the cottage room, I lie down—
I look upward: a ceiling, white and near,
six feet of limit, six feet of sky denied—
no horizon, no field, no road—only this pause.

And yet!
Within this smallness something stirs—
not by my calling, not by my will—
a subtle yielding, a knot undone
by hands I cannot claim as mine.

Then—O then!—the lines return!
Not as I summon them, but as they choose—
they flow, they descend, they wander free,
a long-held current released at last,
a stream remembering its own direction.

I do not command them—I witness!
The words grow lighter as they pass through me,
less possession, more passage,
less burden, more breath—
they know their way better than I.

And I too begin to loosen—
yes, I say it—loosen!
What I clung to falls away,
not lost, but given back to a greater keeping,
a vastness that asks nothing, holds everything.

O small room! O narrow ceiling!
You open—do you not?—into measureless space!
You become sky, you become field, you become the wide unseen,
and I, lying here, enter what has no boundary.

And there—listen—there!
Where nothing must remain,
where even loss is welcomed and set down—
I encounter what does not depart.

Not memory—no.
Not thought—no.
Not even the name I have called my own.

It is presence. It is being. It is—

It is me.

And yet not the me I held and feared to lose,
but the me already gone ahead,
already walking in that other country—
the land I once knew in poem,
the land where the stream runs clear and unforgotten.

Shall I return there?
Shall I step again into that singing current,
feel it rise in me, carry me, make me voice?

Yes—I follow.
I go where it has gone.
I trust the path that does not stay.

For I am not only the keeper of poems—
I am the place they pass through,
the field they cross,
the voice they borrow.

And I go on—
singing, losing, finding—
into that land ahead of me
which has always been my own.

– TaeHun Yoon, May 5, 2025