A Choice of SIlences

You could, you know, become a hermit.
It would far too easy to slip away, to disappear.
The world forgets easier than you might imagine,
always in its own slipstream, moving, moving,
never still. Passing by those who choose stillness,
for it is a choice. Not natural.

It is morning. You sit at the local diner.
Take your time. Sit long after your food is eaten,
after the coffee has turned cold,
and write. A few lines of verse. Paragraphs
in your ancient journal. An accounting
of what you at last can feel, now that you have chosen
to be still.

Music plays. DIners come and go.
Now and again one stops at your table.
but mostly you are not noticed.
you fade into the knotty pine woodwork,
Choosing stillness.

Poison for some, a thing to fear.
Awkward and strange, it is for you
an elixir, the thing that keeps you alive,
good medicine. And more than a little addictive.

Yes, you could be a hermit. It would be easy.
It has its attraction, but you know better.
You have lived in that place of silence,
lived in the darkness of your depression
for too many years, learning the lesson
you were meant to learn –
too much silence kills as certainly
as too much noise, and the trick
is the balance. So, you write this morning,
but only for a while. Knowing at some point
all the looking inward needs to be put away.
The journal must close,
and, if you are to live, truly live,
you must go out, yes, even into the world
that drains you,
for that is what you are meant to do.

About this poem

I love silence. I crave silence. Stillness. But I have learned (the hard way. It’s always the hard way.) too much of it becomes something we were not meant to be – isolated. Man was not mean to be alone. (Check out Genesis 2:8).

The photograph was taken at the Demours mansion in Wilmington, DE.

Tom