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Bloom. Oil. Stop the war.

Published: 25 Mar. 2026, 00:04

Cheon Un-yeong

The author is a novelist.

It is spring. News travels that red plums have opened somewhere. I tap the blossom icons on a map, counting the days to peak cherry bloom, and stand a long while beneath magnolias spilling light along a warm wall. In this season of return, I ask an old question: Are you safe?

This video grab taken from undated images posted on social media on March 23 shows destruction and fire at the Iranian Ministry of Defense's electronics industries building in Tehran following an airstrike. [AFP/YONHAP]

Each day delivers the language of war. Missiles cut the sky, bombs fall, fire rises and children die. It remains distant until someone I know cannot come home because the air routes are closed. Only then does it enter the body. Others measure the crisis differently, in fuel prices, halted factories and falling stocks. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, fear spreads from crude to rare earths and naphtha, even to the rumor of panic buying trash bags. The feeling of war arrives, at times, in strangely small forms.

You once sang that you wished to become a flower. Not oil that feeds greed and war, but something fragile and without power. To bloom, be cut, torn and scattered, and to cover the bare feet of children under bombardment. To press out every last drop of oil and cleanse the humiliation of the motherland. Bloom, oil. It reads like a line written with blood.

I have been thinking of you. I imagine you grieving with your whole body, praying in a voice that sounds less like speech than a low cry after suffering. I know your words do not rest on the lips. They pass through the body first. I placed your poem by the window, waiting for flowers and for the war to end. This spring, even the petals seem to carry the faint scent of oil.

On a day so mild it seemed almost undeserved, I went out walking. The yellow blossoms of cornelian cherry held me in place. I followed their color to the Oil Tank Culture Park in Sangam-dong, Mapo District, western Seoul, a former oil storage site redeveloped into a cultural park after the oil shocks of the 1970s. Five reservoirs stored 69 million liters, enough to supply Seoul for about a month. Now the space has been remade as a cultural park. Oil has become culture, storage turned into renewal.

Beyond it lies World Cup Park, once a floodplain island where migratory birds gathered, then a landfill, and now an ecological park. Passing through, it is difficult to forget what is buried beneath. Behind the names of sky, sunset and peace, there lingers the memory of collapse. The products of excess return, almost without exception, under the sign of ecology.

The Oil Tank Culture Park in Sangam-dong, Mapo District, Seoul, photographed in December 2020. [BAEK JONG-HYUN]

I sat before the massive structures, once oil tanks and now cultural vessels, watching buds open here and there. What does it mean to share an ecological and creative way of life, as the signs propose? What is ecology, what is regeneration, what is culture? And what is war, what is greed? The questions rose like blossoms, one after another.

I closed my eyes and imagined, as your prayer asks, the moment oil becomes flower. What if everything drawn from oil changed at once? Trash bags, plastic bottles, cosmetics, rubber gloves, pens and containers. Refrigerators, washing machines, toilets, chairs and fans. What if they bloomed, then broke, scattering like petals? What if all that fills our daily life suddenly came to rest in a field of flowers?

The thought reveals something we rarely face. We have become beings who cannot live without oil. The structures of our lives depend on it, even as it feeds the forces we fear. The contradiction runs through everything we touch.

What must stop, first and without delay, is the war. Even now, I find myself worrying about a single poet. A poem cannot end a war. Still, I take the urgency of that voice and place it, line by line, into each unopened bud. Bloom, oil. Stop the war.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.