White
On a warm twist of winter
At 5:30 in the morning of Korean calm
An early bus slips past the chot noon [first snow]
Sailing down in windless clusters
Like whispers
Wetting windshields,
Highlighting the beaming headlamps
And washing by the well lit emptiness within…
It greets the faces of early commuters
With little welcome-to-the-day kisses
And brightens the pre-dawn
Sleepy-eyed alleys and avenues…
It alights on coated shoulders
As the late-nighters
Stop and stoop
To scrape the pavement
And pelt pals
Scooping and assailing
On their slippery descent
Down “the Hill”
Exalting in their intoxication
In this extra joy
At the break of Christmas…
Itaewon in the last moments of the millennium
Blanketed in white as if
To wash away the sorrows
Of war and the memory
Of the centuries past…
