While listening is the core of most of our communications … most people stink at it.
—Scientific American, “Now Hear This: Most People Stink at Listening!” by Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson, May 3, 2013
Perhaps they lisp like tiny orange tongues,
each slender calendula petal
as it escapes from the bud
And dust, as it settles, I imagine it sighs.
I would love to hear the lulling of shadows
as they melt into dusk.
Do they shush the grating of crickets,
the buzzing of this body before I lay me
down to steep in night?
I have wondered about the spiny sound
that pinecones make when they grow
their prickles. And the tune of bones
when nothing hurts. And the blood in the heart
when we say goodbye—does it scrape?
Or shriek? Or mewl?
It is one thing to forget. It’s another
to never even know—to miss out on
the bluster of dandelion seeds,
the honeyed pitch of sunrise,
the hush inside the temple of the gourd.
It makes me want to listen
more closely to the world,
to clean out the ears of my heart.
To sit rapt with the stone that remembers
when it was red and molten. To attend
to the stretching of the root,
to the prayer of the sprout,
to the dew as it disappears.