Eternity
— For Jim Galvin
For a decade I have been searching for the meaning of 세월.
In the meantime, a south-bound ferry named Sewol
sank as I watched the passage of teenagers my age
on a school trip drowning on live TV after school.
They were told to wait exactly where they were.
In a devastating apology, someone likened the word
to the passing time or life or beyond the world
the latter of which I have never heard the usage
except when my grandmother murmurs how
I am well-fed without having to stir the pot
of bones for three days as the newfound abundance
is beyond her world. As I pin myself down
to grapple with a modernist poet who precisely
defined the world singing about the sentiment
of passing time passing I am perplexed
to transmit beauty without seeing the double
vision of an especially fine-lined crescent moon
in front of me, mocking my inability to pass
through time beyond my 세월, leaving behind
the orange vests that never came afloat.
I am indebted to speaking the common language
as Sewol that grounds me to temporal discontinuity
in the world that I continue to live haunted
by the memory of peer helplessness.
Mean time brought me to become fluent in carrying
on in a different tongue, one that is still mine.
세월 [se’wol]: passage of time without time passing
I have been speechless for many years.