What’s Underneath

 

That it is never really is

As silent as you think,

Underneath

The sounds

Live the other sounds

The ones you now hear;

The fall of rain

The chattering of the sparrows

In the euonymus bush

Outside the kitchen window

Gossiping like the neighbor women did

When you were a child. How they stood

In a knot as you and the dozen other neighbor kids

Jumped rope, chased dogs

And each other in the dusk, in the street.

And when the birds quiet

The silence

You are left with;

The pulsing of your blood

The want inside your breath

For oxygen yes, but also

For what you’ve wanted

All along.

You hold the words

On your tongue, let them linger.

You will learn

To live with the silence.

You have become the gray of driftwood,

Lean into the wind,

Hold what a cloud holds.

Your heart you’ve tucked in an abandoned nest

in the porch rafters.

From here the fields are lined with fences

wired and measured like our days.

And you see too

That there’s beauty, still, in this.

 

Julia Klatt Singer        March, 2020