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Posts Tagged ‘silence’

Two Hushes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on December 16, 2023| 6 Comments »

as if it’s featherlight,
the great muscle of silence
lifts the weight of the moment
 
* 
with invisible arms
silence plucks me from the noise,
raises me as an offering to the day

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Talking to My Son at Night

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 13, 2023| 9 Comments »

I miss you, I say to the stars,
   The stars are not you,
     but always they seem to listen,
       as if what I have to say is important.
 
I miss you, I say again.
   The stars never talk back.
     Still, I listen for a response.
       When I say I miss you,
 
I mean I’ve barely begun to understand
   what missing you means.
     Though I live it every day.
       Though missing you infuses every breath.
 
Though missing you shapes me—
   especially at night when I’m alone
     and I find myself talking with stars.
       I miss you, I say to the stars.
 
I hear nothing in response.
   I let myself be cradled
     by that nothing.

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In a Circle of Trust

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 9, 2023| 8 Comments »


 
 
I love these fierce and gentle hours 
when the silence between us
blooms between voices
as deeply, as profusely
as the pale pink blossoms
that flourish in pavement cracks.
I did not know how much
I longed for this silence,
Did not know how the silence would honor
each voice the way a frame holds a portrait,
bringing value and beauty to the art inside,
didn’t know how shining it could be
with its infrangible truth,
how silence invites a deepening of self
the way a river deepens and changes the  canyon,
even as the river itself is changed.

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In This Tender Silence

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 5, 2023| 2 Comments »


Offer your beauty always without calculation or defense.
            —Rainer Maria Rilke, “Initial,” trans. Mark S. Burrows
 
 
Oh friend, it’s true. These dark hours
can crumple us, can press.
No way to escape their crush.
How merciless it can be,
the fist of grief,
how strong the squeeze,
how difficult to believe
we’ll survive.
 
Today, it is enough
to offer the world
only the simplest song—
the wordless, tuneless
song of beingness.
How beautiful it is,
this offering,
your breath against my cheek.

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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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