There is something about getting older that changes how you understand strength.

When I was younger, I thought being strong meant standing firm, defending what I believed, and refusing to let the world change me. I still believe there are things worth standing for. But life has taught me that not every disagreement deserves a battle, and not every change means you have surrendered something important.

Reading the poetry of Dr. Kang Byeong-Cheol brought me back to that thought.

Four of his poems stayed with me, each for a different reason.

In Do Not Draw Stripes on a Watermelon, I found myself thinking about how much energy we spend trying to turn people into what we believe they should be.

We do it in relationships, families, communities, and sometimes even with ourselves.

We expect people to think like us, believe what we believe, or respond to life the way we would. Then we become frustrated when they don’t.

But why should they?

A person’s identity is not something we should feel entitled to redesign.

That thought carries particular meaning for me because of my Caribbean heritage and my experience growing up with different cultural influences. I’ve learned that people can share similar values while expressing them in completely different ways.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that we don’t understand one another. It’s that we expect understanding to produce agreement.

Those are two different things.

Then I read The Sharp Rocks by the Seashore.

I thought about the people I’ve encountered over the years, the difficult conversations, the disappointments, and even the mistakes I’ve made.

Some experiences leave us more guarded. Others teach us to become more patient.

I used to think compromise meant somebody had to lose. Now I see that compromise can also mean two people have decided their relationship matters more than proving who is right.

Of course, compromise has limits. Respect should never require someone to abandon their dignity.

Still, there is wisdom in knowing when to stand firm and when to soften your approach.

A rock does not have to stop being a rock to lose its sharp edges.

Starlight Time brought me somewhere else entirely.

I started thinking about influence.

Not fame. Not recognition. Just the ordinary ways people affect one another.

A conversation someone remembers years later. A teacher who encourages a struggling student. A parent who gives advice that makes little sense until adulthood. A stranger whose kindness arrives at exactly the right moment.

Most of us will never know how far those moments travel.

As a writer and poet, I think about that whenever I publish something. Once the words leave my hands, I cannot control where they go or what someone might find in them.

I can only hope they carry something worth remembering.

And then there is The Moon and Mother.

That poem made me think about family, memory, and the things we inherit that have nothing to do with money or possessions.

We inherit expressions, habits, beliefs, recipes, stories, and sometimes fears that nobody ever explained to us.

In Caribbean households, as in many families around the world, history often survives through ordinary conversation. Someone tells a story while preparing food. Someone remembers a relative who has been gone for years. Someone repeats advice that has traveled through several generations.

We may not recognize those moments as cultural preservation while they are happening.

But that is exactly what they can become.

What interests me about Dr. Kang’s poetry is how naturally these ideas cross borders.

He writes from a Korean cultural and literary perspective. I read from my own experiences as an African American man with Caribbean roots. Our histories are not identical, and I would not pretend they are.

Yet his poems gave me room to examine my own life.

That is one of the things I value most about literature.

It does not require us to share the same background before we can learn from one another.

And perhaps that is where transformation begins.

Not when we become somebody else, but when we discover that our understanding of the world was never complete.

I still have convictions. I still make mistakes. There are days when patience comes easily and others when it requires deliberate effort.

I am learning that maturity is not measured only by what we know. Sometimes it is revealed by what we are willing to reconsider.

Dr. Kang’s poems reminded me that change does not have to erase identity. It can deepen our understanding of it.

And I find that worth carrying forward.