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Posts Tagged ‘silence’

New Prayer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 14, 2023| 17 Comments »


I cannot hear it, the beep of the IV
or the tick of nurse’s pen on the chart
or the wheels of the gurney as they roll
into the operating room, can’t hear
the voice of the doctor or the anesthesiologist,
can’t hear the soft tide of her breath
as she drifts into blackness nor the dry
mumbling from her lips as she comes to.
So I listen to this room and the silence
that holds it, listen to the only words
that rise up in me.
I love you. I love you. I love you.  
I whisper it into the silence
as if a thousand miles away she could hear them.
And then it is only silence.
It wraps its sound around me
soft as a mother’s embrace,
gentle and strong as wings that fold me in
until silence itself becomes prayer.  

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One Inside the Blossoming

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on September 26, 2023| 7 Comments »

 
 
though I tell you everything,
there is so much I don’t say—
the way an orchid
is nourished by shade,
the way silence is nourished by silence

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Translation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on September 22, 2023| 15 Comments »


 
In a quiet house
a woman can have
quiet thoughts,
can sit in the quiet
and let the quiet
inside. In a quiet house,
a woman can sit
on the couch
in a quiet room
and watch the leaves
out the window
as they do not move
in the wind
that is not there.
How quiet it is,
the kind of deep quiet
that makes a woman
slip into the quiet
as if it’s inevitable,
and the quiet seeps in
and fills her the way
water seeps quietly
into the sand,
and the house is quiet
and the air is quiet
and the woods are quiet
and the world is quiet
and the woman is quiet
until she rhymes
with quiet,
until she becomes
the attention
that meets the quiet
and the quiet
becomes her.
 

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The Conversation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 3, 2023| 11 Comments »

Outside the kitchen door,
your large green crocs sit, empty.
I slip my feet into them
and shuffle around the porch.
Life went on, I say to the air, to you.
I scuffle past the cinquefoil
with its plentiful yellow blooms,
shamble past the small and robust lilac bush
friends gave us after you died.
Look at all this life, I say to you,
to the air. It’s in everything.
It’s in me, too, this burgeoning.
And then I’m crying with the all of it—
the fierce sun and the blur of hummingbirds
and the ache in my chest and
the green in the field and
the terrible, wondrous truth—
Life goes on. For a long time,
I shuffle and talk to the air.
As always, your silence speaks back.
I listen to it beneath the rush
of the river, hear it beneath the birds,
sense it beneath the shush
of the wind in the grass.
 

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One Eavesdropping

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on July 18, 2023| 4 Comments »

 
silence has a secret
the whole night
leans in to listen

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Confession to Silence

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on July 6, 2023| 6 Comments »


 
I say I love you,
and then I start singing.
I say I want you,
and then I fill in
each moment
with conversation,
with stories, with music,
with the tap, tap, tap
of my antsy foot.
Silence, I come to your altar
with hymns, with prayers,
when all you ask of me
is that I come to you.
With this confession,
already I feel you
spreading through my body
like the scent after rain,
my cells opening to you,
you filling them with all
that glorious nothing.

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For a Moment

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 11, 2023| 9 Comments »


 
So keep this refuge in mind: the back roads of your self.
            —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Gregory Hays
 
 
And so tonight I travel
the back roads of self
to a place with no shovel,
no spoon, no pen,
no wheel, no stick,
and find there
the peace that arrives
when the idea of traveler
dissolves. And then the
road. And then the self.

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Like Sunshine

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 23, 2023| 6 Comments »




The way the sunshine warms me
through my coat, through my clothes,
that is the way I want to listen to you—
want to listen so closely I feel
your words permeate anything
that covers me, listen so closely
to your thoughts and fears and hopes
that they slip in and touch me.
When you are quiet, it is as if the sun
has gone behind a cloud.
I want to listen, too, to that—
to know the shadows of your silences.
Even then, there is so much
you are saying. I think of how,
on cloudy days, too, my skin
becomes brown. I want to understand
you—not just to listen but to learn,
not just to learn but to open to you,
to let you see how it is you change me.

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From Six Hours Away

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 30, 2023| 2 Comments »


for Joan Shearer


From six hours away,
she holds my hand.
Tonight when my ship
has no anchor, she meets
me in the waves and
floats with me there.
Not because I told her
I needed her. It’s more
that her soul is ever ready
to bob in the swells.
We drift. We say nothing,
but I don’t feel alone.
We’re alive in the silence
that weaves through all sound,
connected by the invisible
currents that govern whatever
is real. What is real: letting
another person feel what they feel.
And being there with them,
saying “I love being with you like this,”
sharing the fullness so present
even from six hours away.

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Two Months after My Son Died

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 26, 2023| 3 Comments »


for MS


She gave me an hour.
Since then, every minute
has grown from the soil
of that time.
She gave me silence.
It was the wisest teaching.
She did not know me.
She deeply understood my heart.
There was a time
when she, too,
was met with unthinkable loss.
Now she knows
to say the name
of the one who is gone.
She knows not to fix.
She knows the gift
of being seen.
She asked for nothing
in return.
Over a year later,
I remember how she listened
with her eyes.
I remember the generosity
of her gaze.
She lit a candle for my child,
a golden light
on a bed of amethyst.
With that flame,
she has lit hundreds more
through my hand.
Sometimes I wonder
where her flame began,
I think of all the hands
lighting all the candles.
How beautiful that light.
How far we have come
from the dark we have known.

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