9 Aug 2021 – Suddenly Silent #4

The Fourth Silence

Why #4? 

Why “The Fourth Silence”?

The answer is straightforward: Before today’s poem, I have written three other poems focusing on Silence. Everything else about “Suddenly Silent #4 is anything but straightforward.

Sound. Silence. “The Sound of Silence*,” if you were young in the 1960s and knew that amazing duo, Simon and Garfunkel. No matter your age, check this out – “Hello darkness, my old friend  . . . touched the sound of silence . . . And no one dared / Disturb the sound of silence . . .” Darkness and Silence – we shrink from the thought of living blind and deaf. Yet, the question is: Am I metaphorically blind and deaf? What am I not seeing? What am I not hearing?

Today’s poem provides a platform for such inquiries.

Suddenly Silent - #4

A shout leaves me deaf for twenty-three days

I long for the last echo

I suck in my breath and swallow my voice

and understand everything at once

No speaking to say Nothing said No confessions

Tongue of clay Emptiness to all ten directions

I stick out my tongue in awe

Speech does not accord with the situation

I execute the essential pivot

I hang up my stick at the axial point

and stay twenty-three years

at the sharp and dangerous river’s edge

Looking at myself 

through my own two eyeballs

Three times I felt

claws and fangs at work

No one can leap clear

Once, I accepted words, and foundered

Later, phrase-worms punctured my head

Questions cracked open my skull

and serpent-mikkyo trickled out

Background

When I was very young, I preferred silence. I spent most days exploring prairie fields, hardwood stands, tiny streams, and broad, flat rocks hidden below tall, swaying grasses. I had my reasons for favoring silence compared to what was going on in the house where I lived. I spent most of my pre-school years seeking out silence, so naturally, when I entered elementary school, the tinny din of fifty attention-seekers drove me even further into silence. And when I started to write poetry just a few years later, I couldn’t bear the disturbance of voices, television, radio, or drunken laughter. Is it any wonder that only four poems focus on Silence?

Exploration 1: Are darkness and silence meaningful to you. If so, in what way?

Exploration 2: Are you comfortable with silence? Do the context and conditions make a difference? How long do you prefer silence given the foregoing?

Exploration 3: Define silence as you experience it.

Exploration 4:  Care to explore the definition of mikkyo? It is a Japanese word related to Buddhism.

*Source: Musixmatch / Songwriter: Paul Simon / The Sound of Silence lyrics © Paul Simon Music