Silence
- I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
- And the silence of the city when it pauses,
- And the silence of a man and a maid,
- And the silence of the sick
- When their eyes roam about the room.
- And I ask: For the depths,
- Of what use is language?
- A beast of the field moans a few times
- When death takes its young.
- And we are voiceless in the presence of realities –
-
We cannot speak.
- A curious boy asks an old soldier
- Sitting in front of the grocery store,
- “How did you lose your leg?”
- And the old soldier is struck with silence,
- Or his mind flies away
- Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
- It comes back jocosely
- And he says, “A bear bit it off.”
- And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
- Dumbly, feebly lives over
- The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
- The shrieks of the slain,
- And himself lying on the ground,
- And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
- And the long days in bed.
- But if he could describe it all
- He would be an artist.
- But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
-
Which he could not describe.
- There is the silence of a great hatred,
- And the silence of a great love,
- And the silence of an embittered friendship.
- There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
- Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
- Comes with visions not to be uttered
- Into a realm of higher life.
- There is the silence of defeat.
- There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
- And the silence of the dying whose hand
- Suddenly grips yours.
- There is the silence between father and son,
- When the father cannot explain his life,
-
Even though he be misunderstood for it.
- There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
- There is the silence of those who have failed;
- And the vast silence that covers
- Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
- There is the silence of Lincoln,
- Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
- And the silence of Napoleon
- After Waterloo.
- And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc
- Saying amid the flames, “Blessed Jesus” –
- Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
- And there is the silence of age,
- Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
- In words intelligible to those who have not lived
-
The great range of life.
- And there is the silence of the dead.
- If we who are in life cannot speak
- Of profound experiences,
- Why do you marvel that the dead
- Do not tell you of death?
- Their silence shall be interpreted
- As we approach them.