— Song of My Soul, Song of My Tenelach

I do not write
to follow rules
or to walk the tidy paths
someone else laid down.

I write
because something inside me
has begun to speak—
a small trembling voice
that feels less like my own
and more like a visitor
sent by God.

For years
I kept my inner life hidden.
Grief folded quietly
into the corners of the heart.
Joy guarded like a fragile flame.
Regret carried behind a practiced smile.
I learned to appear whole
even when something inside me
was quietly breaking.

But a heart
cannot hold everything forever.
One day the silence cracks,
and truth rises—
slowly, then suddenly—
like a long‑sleeping mountain
finding its fire again.

So I write.

Not because I am wise,
but because poetry lets me say
what I could never say aloud:
I was hurt.
I was grateful.
I feared.
I hoped.
I failed.
I loved.
I am learning.

Sometimes my poems
feel like small apologies—
to those I misunderstood,
to those I wounded,
and to the younger self
who waited so long
to be spoken for.

Writing gives regret
a place to breathe.
It gives gratitude
a voice.
It gives sorrow
a shape.
It gives joy
a room to dance.

And I write
because I am an introvert
walking quietly
through a loud world.
Conversation hesitates.
Words tangle.
But a poem—
a poem travels freely,
crossing the distance
between two hearts
without knocking.

Somewhere,
a stranger may read my lines
and whisper,
“I have felt this.”
And suddenly
we are no longer strangers.
Two quiet souls
meet inside a single moment.

This is tenelach—
the soul‑friendship
that happens without introduction,
without biography,
without explanation.
A meeting of hearts
in the quiet space
where God often speaks.

I write also
to touch the unseen consciousness
moving through the world—
someone in Korea,
someone in America,
someone I will never meet.
Yet for one breath
our souls lean together
over the same flame.

And perhaps
there is a deeper reason still.

I want to enter
a timeless place—
a place where clocks
cannot reach me,
where my aging body
does not have the final word,
where imagination
is free,
where beauty
does not die.

Perhaps I want
to live beyond myself—
not in monuments,
not in stone,
not even in memory,
but in the breath of a poem.
A line may travel farther
than the life that made it.
A heart may stop,
but a poem may continue breathing.

And then—
I am still there.
Not as a body,
but as a presence.
Not as a name,
but as a feeling.
Not bound by time,
but released into it.

So I write.

I write when I am joyful.
I write when I am grieving.
I write when regret knocks.
I write when silence grows heavy.
I write when beauty surprises me.
I write when memory rises like smoke.
I write when a new thought
opens like a flower in the dark.

I write because
my heart has finally learned
that it does not need
to remain silent.

Let the poem come
as it wishes—
like rain,
like fire,
like a wandering bird
crossing the evening sky.
Let it tremble.
Let it wander.
Let it breathe.

Because poetry
is not something I force.
It is something that happens
when my inner life
meets the presence of God
and begins to speak.

This is the song of my soul.
This is my way
of being with God—
as a tenelach,
a quiet companion
walking beside the Eternal
with trembling hands
and an open heart.

And when my hands grow still,
when my voice becomes quiet,
perhaps somewhere
a stranger will open a poem
and find me there—
still breathing,
still wondering,
still loving,
still becoming.

This is why I write poems.

Not to obey rules,
but to free the heart.
Not to escape life,
but to enter it more deeply.
Not to live forever in the body,
but to remain alive
in imagination
and in the hearts
of those I may never know.

I write—
and therefore,
I continue to live.

— TaeHun Yoon, August, 2026