Tag: silence

The Cusan Sky

When color fails and sepia ascends,
it is not a lesser kingdom taking the throne—
it is the throne admitting
it was always borrowed light.

Blue steps down first,
humblest of the courtiers,
having pretended sky long enough.
Then green,
then every noon-loud hue,
filing out like a court dismissed
from a kingdom never theirs.

What ascends is not a color at all
but the confession beneath color—
the brown of old earth,
old paper,
old bone,
the ground from which all colors briefly rose,
waiting
the way silence waits
under every word
that thought itself necessary.

This is not dusk.
Dusk still bargains with the sun.
This is the sky
relinquishing every borrowed name,
becoming itself
by what it is no longer—

not red,
not gold,
not the day you expected,
but the day before adjectives.

AUSTERE HOUSE

Beginnings stretch outward.
A trembling breath lingers.
Silence gestates
before the word is spoken.
The air holds still,
struck through with sensation,
as the unseen gathers
toward its trembling.

What do I see?
A shadow
escorted like a cenotaph,
a face dissolved
through clouds of doctrine.

What do I hear?
The long decay
of a voice grown old,
a quarrel flowering again
in the rooms of forgetting;
names abandoned,
a litany of the missing,
whose silence now
cuts more savagely
than their speech ever did.

What do I know?
I carry
the weight of not-knowing,
and raise from absence
its austere house.
Less than I imagine,
less than I understand.
Yet more
than I dare remember,
I hold.

Wastrel Words

Wastrel words, freely falling,
proliferate across the civic square—
each one a coin debased by minting,
spending itself before it’s there.

We talk and talk and fill the air
with syllables that cost us nothing,
the public tongue grown fat and dull,
its silences worth more than something.

What once was said with care and weight
now tumbles out, familiar, free—
a currency no longer backed
by thought, by blood, by what we’ve witnessed.

Speak less. Mean more. The word that waits
inside the throat, ungiven yet,
is richer than the thousand loosed
and already, mercifully, forgot.

Silence as Falling

By Donald S. Yarab

ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή

“The way up and the way down are one and the same.”
—Heraclitus, Fragment 60 (Diels–Kranz); cf. Fragment 69 (Kirk & Raven)

When the mind enclosed reels, the frame gives way—
No border left to mark the night from day.
No cry, no anchor, only this descent
Where meaning bleeds and thought is all but spent.

It is not drift, but failure to remain—
The loosening of self from shape, from name.
It does not seek, nor struggle, nor insist—
It simply ceases, lost beyond all reach.

No wind attends, no witness marks the trace,
No voice declares the vanishing of place.
The silence is not peace, but what survives
When all the scaffolds break, and none revives.

No hand to hold, no vow left to defend—
One thought still clings—then breaks before the bend.
Just falling, falling, not to sky or land,
But into being none can understand.

Victoire de Samothrace – Musee du Louvre

Ode to the Deep

Photo by Sebastian Voortman on Pexels.com

I. Stillness Before the Descent
What stirs in silence but the thought of falling?
The soul leans forward at the edge of time,
Where earth gives way to rhythm without measure—
No firmament beneath, no axis left to climb.
The wind is absent here. The light, unsure.
All motion trembles on the breath of stillness.
We speak of peace, yet dread the calmest shore—
For we have built our gods from fear and witness.

II. The Water Below
Not storm, not wave, nor tempest’s hissing swell,
But quiet depth—the fathomless unknown,
Uncoiling silence from a buried bell
Where light has never touched the sea-worn stone.
Here dwell no monsters, save the mind’s own eye.
The fear is not of drowning, but of seeing—
That which reflects not sky, but self, and why
The soul recoils from naked being.

III. The Humbling
The sea does not instruct with word or wind—
It shapes the soul by salt and slow erosion.
A kneeling cliff, worn smooth where waves have pinned
Each boast to sand, each name to dark devotion.
The deeper still you go, the less you hold—
No torch remains, no doctrine, no command.
The deep forgives, but never does it fold—
It presses wonder into trembling hand.

IV. What Remains
So is the fear a gift, once held aright—
A trembling compass on the soul’s long chart.
For he who feared the deep, yet dared its night,
Returns not wise—but hollowed, whole of heart.
He cannot speak of what he saw below,
Only that silence taught him how to kneel.
And those who know will know. The rest may go
To read their truths upon a turning wheel.