The pauses in the music set me free,
With petrified and wrinkled hick’ry hands
Whose charitable wisdom understands
The honesty of corners, just to be…
In shadow of a kind, straightforward tree
Which stitches me with peaceful purple strands,
I feel the silence seeping through the sands,
The quiet warm embrace of history.
And into darkness I would send my soul,
To unforgotten passages of night
And fragments of an old geometry
So that I might again perceive the whole
And, sinking, shy away from blinding light,
And learn to let the silence speak to me.
1982