Beyond the World
He was sitting here.
Here, where cups were lifted,
where steam from soup and broth
blurred the window a little,
where ordinary hunger met ordinary light,
where a hand could rest on a tabletop
and still belong to the world.
He was sitting here playing guitar,
not yet a headline,
not yet a number folded into the nation’s mouth,
not yet a yellow ribbon,
not yet a photograph held up
by trembling fingers in a street full of rain.
He was talking about the trip
the way young people talk
when tomorrow still sounds trustworthy,
when distance is a bright thing,
when the sea is only scenery,
when adults are supposed to know
what to do with danger.
Just how important this trip was to him.
As if importance could save anyone.
As if excitement were a life jacket.
As if hope could float.
As if the world did not so often
require the young
to pay for the negligence of the old.
And what is justice
before a table still remembering elbows,
before a chair with no one in it,
before a guitar that will never again
be lifted by the hands
that taught its strings to speak?
What court can summon the water?
What sentence can be passed
against a wave,
against greed,
against cowardice dressed as procedure,
against every polished lie
that told children to stay where they were
while death kept climbing?
No justice.
Not enough for the mothers
whose sleep is now a corridor of names.
Not enough for the fathers
who learned that rage can outlive prayer.
Not enough for classmates
growing older than the dead.
Not enough for a people
forced to memorize the sound
of preventable sorrow.
Because justice, if it comes at all,
comes limping.
Comes after the cameras.
Comes after the flowers have browned at the edges.
Comes after officials bow their heads
and call grief a lesson.
Comes after memory has already done
the harder work
of refusing to let the lost be managed.
Still, I want to say his life was larger
than the drowning.
Larger than the ferry’s tilted throat.
Larger than the cold arithmetic of blame.
He was sitting here.
He was playing guitar.
He was talking.
He was alive in the small bright ways
that make the ruin unbearable.
That is the wound.
Not only that they died,
but that they lived so specifically—
with favorite songs,
half-finished jokes,
text messages unsent,
plans folded in their pockets
like paper birds.
No justice can return him
to the chair,
to the restaurant by the school,
to the moment before the sea
became an accusation.
But let there be this much:
that we do not call forgetting peace.
That we do not call delay wisdom.
That we do not call apology repair.
That we do not let profit, pride, or power
bury the children twice.
He was sitting here playing guitar,
talking about just how important
this trip was to him.
So let the line remain open,
like a string still trembling
after the hand is gone.
Let it accuse us.
Let it haunt the rooms
where decisions are made.
Let it be heavier than slogans,
sharper than ceremony,
truer than the speeches of men
who survive their own failures.
And let the dead
be more than the manner of their dying.
Let them be remembered
sitting here,
in the light,
with music in them,
with tomorrow in them,
with all that was entrusted to the world—
and all that the world
had no right
to take.
(Author’s Note: On April 16, 2014, the South Korean ferry Sewol sank off the country’s southwestern coast while carrying hundreds of passengers, many of them students from Danwon High School on a class trip. More than 300 people died, most of them teenagers. The ferry was carrying twice its legal capacity and the investigation found significant negligence and falsified documentation from ferry owners and the coast guard. This poem is based on a CNN article retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2014/04/25/world/asia/south-korea-lost-students
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