Tuesday, March 16, 2010

silence


"Silence is Golden."
Who says so?
Who decided,
And why,
That silence is
Something to be valued,
Prized as gold?

Who was it
That was possessed
Of enough wisdom
That he could know
The nature of something
That by that very nature
Is unknowable?

Is silence gold?
Or is it dross?
Or is it neither of these?
Is it as it appears,
Simply formless, shapeless
An absence of anything, really.
A void.

The airless vacuum
Of the space that
Surrounds me
Engulfs me
The highwayman that
Steals my breath
My sleep.

If only
I could bring
The silence without
Inside where it might
Serve some purpose
Quiet the chorus within
I might feel differently.
This image and poem -- along with many others -- is featured in my book , available from

About this piece: I'm not a morning person. Never have been. So waking up at 4 AM is pretty disorienting. Nothing else is awake at that hour. Not the birds, not even the squirrels -- the absence of which someone I know once called "the last word in stillness". Turns out though, that it can inspire... something anyway. Not just this piece, but the "prequel" of this one were born from it.

About the photo: No, I wasn't out shooting this one at 4 AM. I was looking for an image of silence, and you have to admit, she's not going to say much.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Silence, tandem-harnessed to Tranquility, pulls a carriage that is 'Peace'.

SandyCarlson said...

I am afraid to leave a comment that will be the wrong comment, as I did the last time I was here. My response is really the silence of "yes," the silence of concord, of believing I get it.

I am thinking of how the circumstances of another person's life could necessitate silence (or simply cause it) that has nothing to do with anybody else, though others are affected.

I think sometimes silence is the high tide of another person's life when there's no getting to shore.