A Name Borrowed from Winter- Dr. Lim Hayoung

All night long, the spring rain leans
against the windowpane in a hushed voice,
erasing the names of flowers only to write them again.
At early dawn,
at the end of a rain-soaked alley,
the wind, still unable to abandon
winter’s sentence, lets out a long, cool breath.
Those just in bloom
—before they can even ask why they have blossomed—
tremble, scatter,
and release their colors into the air,
becoming for a fleeting moment
a sentence of light,
then fading away.
Spring, as always,
arrives with doubt before arrival itself,
gently pressing the shoulders of the fragile,
measuring the weight of being alive.
The instant a single petal
turns over in the cold wind,
I come to understand:
the seasons are an ancient sentence,
completed by pushing one another away.
And so, this trembling now, too,
may be nothing more than a slender stroke of ink—
spring, borrowing winter for a moment
to inscribe its name more deeply.





