In the beginning was the tremor—
the thirty-eighth parallel drawn like a wound across a peninsula. Water stirs in the glass before me, concentric, faithful as any psalm to its own diminishing.
·
The shell's interior: lustrous, wet with having held.
·
The word for home—집, 고향—carried but not spoken.
·
My past selves compressed: a single pastel rendering of Busan's harbor, of Seoul before the burning, of a country the body remembers.
·
Blessed are the distances that cannot be crossed by letter.
·
My mother's tears consecrate a surface I was not made to touch.
The Yellow Sea has done its slow work upon her—roughened what was once offered whole. She belongs to a world my sight cannot enter: the occupation's silence, the war's long echo, 도라산 Station where trains no longer run north.
I write to her. The characters arrive emptied.
한글 bends under the weight of what it cannot carry.
What passes between languages is not meaning but 한—
genuflecting.
·
The sacrament of the mirror.
I stand before it. I ask nothing.
And still my own salt falls—patient, erosive, devoted to the long work of wearing down what was never quite solid.
·
The exterior weathers. The interior gleams.
I am both shell and sea, the corroding and the corroded, kneeling at the threshold where what we were becomes what we cannot retrieve—
a whole Korea, unmapped, unbroken,
shimmering beneath the nacre of forgetting.
·
To the silence between tongues.
To the families still waiting at the border.
To what ripples and stills.
