The pauses in the music set me free

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