Jeniffer Yoo, South Korea's National Honour
September 2026
Hold This End
I. Six Legs, Four Days
He measured the room
before he measured wood.
Walked its length twice,
said nothing,
walked it again.
Some fathers buy a desk
already whole.
Mine bought planks
and told me: hold the tape.
Four days he knelt
Into that floor,
a level’s one green eye
rolling, and rolling,
until it lay
flat as a held breath.
I was fifteen,
grown already past
what the old desk knew.
He didn’t say
this is for who you’ll become.
He said hold this end.
Don’t let it drop.
By the fourth night
the wood ran the wall’s full length,
longer than any child requires,
built, I see now,
for someone
who wasn’t yet born into it,
the way a man
leaves a door unlocked
for someone
not yet home.
II. The Bicycle He Never Grew Into
He told me this once,
only because I asked
what the desk had meant to him,
whether someone,
once, had built him
this kind of room.
There was no desk.
There was a bicycle,
frame too long for his legs,
a seat he could not reach
flat-footed.
Rather than wait
the two years it would take
to fit him,
he got on wrong-sized,
wobbled the alley’s length,
fell twice,
and on the third pass, stayed
knees splayed,
laughing at something
none of us were there to hear.
Not a lesson. A weight
set down at last,
one he’d carried so long
he’d forgotten it was there.
A line of fathers, I think,
each teaching the next
to let go
a little sooner than they had been let,
how far back it runs,
even he didn’t know.
He had been forty years learning to ride
what was too big for him,
and had been quietly
handing me the bicycle
ever since:
this desk, this door,
this leaving
he let happen
without once reaching out
to steady the seat,
without once
calling me home.
III. Won and Won and Won
His own father told him
two things
that should have cancelled out
and never did:
save what you can,
even a hundred won,
a thousand, ten thousand,
small coins pressed edge to edge
like teeth in a jar,
and if it gets
to be too much,
you can always
come home.
Be responsible for yourself.
You are not, however, alone.
I have turned that coin
over for years
the way you turn a stone
looking for the dry side.
It never resolves.
It was never meant to.
Two hands
on the same rope,
holding from opposite ends,
not pulling.
Just keeping it
taut enough to climb,
should I ever need
to come home.
IV. What They Bring
I live two hours
from the house that built me,
in a room I keep myself now,
laundry folded
by my own uneven hands,
a kitchen
I’m still learning the grammar of.
And still, some Saturdays,
my mother and grandmother arrive
with banchan
stacked and sealed,
as if it might spill
its whole meaning
if the lid slipped loose
in the trunk.
They find the corners
I forgot to clean.
leave a parka in winter,
a cooling pad in summer,
love arriving
in the shape of weather
before I’ve thought to fear it,
pulling me back, some Saturdays
two hours toward home.
V. What He Built the Surface For
He built the desk
longer than I needed
so I’d have to decide, myself,
where the working ends
and the living starts,
no shelf to tell me,
no groove already cut.
Just wood,
and the slow arithmetic
of getting it wrong
for years,
until it was my own.
He isn’t in the room
when I sit down to it now.
He never meant to be.
That was the quiet architecture
of the whole thing:
he built the surface level
So that whatever I stacked on it after:
books, failure, coffee rings,
a second desk in another house,
this poem,
this life two hours from his hands,
would have something true
to stand on.
Some men build a house
and call it love.
Mine built a straight line
and a way out,
checked it twice,
and let me walk it
home.
Score: 94 out of 100.
A sincere, well-observed sequence with several memorable images and an earned ending, held back from the top tier by explanatory slack and uneven length across its sections.
Read the September 2026 National Honours