When I visit the Leeum Museum,
there lives a female spider nearing the end of her days.
She cradles her eggs inside a steel womb,
its dark paint worn away and peeling.
With slender, aging legs
that barely bear the memory of her once-magnificent frame,
she anchors a tender, green sorrow.
In a grand and spacious hall, her dark-brown body—once vibrant and lustrous,
spinning silk amid a froth of life—
once throbbed raw and living,
like tides forever coming and going.
Now that reckless inner world stands empty,
so hollow it seems it could collapse at any moment.
Yet within the cold steel cage, long bereft of warmth,
she still guards her eggs—
that mother who will close her eyes only after they have finally hatched.
My own mother, who may draw her last breath at any time—
and I, once the flower of her life, have nothing worthy enough to offer her in return.
Could I not gather her back into my own womb, and bid her live once more?
