💜The first poem loved by librarian Kim Ha-gyeong💜 Are You the First Snow? (Lee Gyu-ri, *Are You the First Snow?*) When someone brushes past, a faint glance makes contact; the heart, which I try to feel out but which soon vanishes while I hesitate, is futile too. We talked more about futile things. Otherwise, we could not have borne what we passed by without knowing; we could not have done anything about our bare faces laid completely bare. We could pass on because we could not quite remember, though it seemed we might. If not, we might have clung to a stranger and become even more futile. Over the futile things drifting down, some say it is the first snow, others say it is not the first snow, and once again feel their way through the empty air: Are you the first snow? A word, endured for so long that all its bones have broken, someone brings out with difficulty. What has gone all the way to the end is white, and white again. O heart that finally wells up with tears, you cannot call sorrow sorrow, you cannot call yesterday a distant place, still less can you call emptiness emptiness. You were the first snow when we called sunlight melancholy, when we had to call clouds a misunderstanding, and even when we said the darkness was not dark. You were the first snow. Once, we gathered it up and carefully set it down in a room. Because we wanted to possess a thing called empty air; because it was the only meaning we were permitted. The air over there, where things flutter and drift, had no form. Are you the first snow? There are people who remain dimly in my memory. They must be people with whom I shared something somewhere, or moments that felt complete simply because we “were together.” Sadly, I have no way to contact them now, or even to know how they are doing. Turning over the familiar cliché that where there are meetings, there must be partings, I call out to someone who is no longer beside me as if they were here beside me. You, I say. It is a sorrow so painful that I could never bear it without the self-deprecating thought that it was “futile.” You know how it is: when we let go of a piece of good fortune or an opportunity we missed, we think, “It wasn’t such a big deal anyway,” and try somehow to downgrade what we still yearn for, so we can forget it coldly. “The heart that finally wells up with tears” reads to me as “a heart that I could not bring myself to let pass by.”