A poet who became the star out the window

Korean poet Hong Yoon-sook closed her eyes in the arms of God around this time three years ago. I wanted to become a priest. She embraced me as if she were my eldest sister. Her advice led me into the right direction when I was faced with a critical juncture in my life.

Hong was a figure of eternal grace and right-mindedness. She was always considerate of people around her with a generous smile. She exercised thorough self-reflection in defiance of vanity. In her view, the world looked otherworldly. Her grim resolve and sorrow were not a result of appreciation deriving from self-love, but rather a destined thirst to reveal the light of the truth and the existence of an entity hidden behind the irregularities.

The Korean poet compared poetry as a bullet that went right through her life. She confessed that the bullet passed through her deeply, close to the core, and passionately. The scar enraptured her. At the core of her life were deep atrocity of war, confrontation and confusion. Meanwhile, she asked herself with a sense of history, “How can one keep his self-esteem intact by valuing dignity all the time?”

She has gone with her sorrowful voice over her inner self and history left behind in this world. In a solemn voice, she is singing a song of yearning somewhere between the two worlds. She becomes a blow of wind, a young green shooting and goes up to the skies to shine with other stars. On a peaceful field, I miss her calm voice, which resonated afar just as the last beam of sunlight comes into the window.