My Unbearable Silence

or, Why I’m Not Writing About Wars and the Extinction of Species

My unbearable silence

will not let go of me.

Words choke in my throat.

The poems don’t stumble

or fall – they are paralysed

before they start. Horrors

we can’t help contemplate

strike me silent. It’s not 

that I don’t want to cry out

against them. To scream or sob

would be release, if only

in that moment. To yell outrage

might at least make the point,

even to those who refuse to listen:

they could not afterwards say

that the words were never said.

But the saying dies inside me

before being born, in the face of 

all the words said by others, unheard.

Written for Poets and Storytellers United, in response to Friday Writings #144; To speak up or stay silent? in which we are invited to consider a poem by Rajani Radhakrishnan. My title here, and the reference to stumbling and falling, quote that poem.

Tableau of My Street

Two magpies warbling

in the sunny day

soar across my street,

my little hill street

beneath the mountain

and the great clear sky.

In all the gardens

lining my calm street,

trees and more trees reach

high and wide. There is

an ease, a leisure,

in their space, their spread.

The magpies, too, are

blithely unhurried

although gone too soon

with their liquid song,

guided by instinct

as their lives require.

They won’t go as far 

as the mountain. That

is home to eagles.

Those, I love to watch

riding the currents

of the lofty winds.

But that’s memory:

an earlier street

the other mountain

and my love, who was

alive then, watching

beside me, smiling.

This town surrounded

by mountains and birds,

and everywhere trees,

delights me daily. 

In the long nights, still,

I know myself blessed.

Sharing with Friday Writings #143 at Poets and Storytellers United. 

Off prompt. Instead I'm pinching a recent form prompt from dVerse: the tableau poetry style. (The instructions say 5 beats per line, but examination reveals them to be not beats but syllables. Beats in a line of poetry are usually understood as the stressed syllables.)