A Song of Silence

Quaker Meeting House,
Brant Broughton

Silence all around us, 
without and within,
where we encounter that condition
of complete stillness.

A place of sending out;
from it is launched
music, and to silence
the melody returns.

A place of gathering in;
yet I can sit among the hills
and share my gathered drop of silence
with the aching chasms of centuries.

Silence of antiquity,
expansive, profound, reaching beyond
memories too deep for expression,
emptying them out
to nothing.

A quietude,
strong, unknowable,
summoning. Present, past and future
united in pregnant resonance
that moves and stays, moves and stays,
and passes into chant that fades.

© Janet Henderson 3rd September 2015

With acknowledgement of the reference, in the first stanza, to T.S.Eliot's Little Gidding (The Four Quartets)  'Quick, now, here, now, always, A condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything'. Wislawa Szymborska summed up the dilemma of speaking or writing about silence in her poem The Three Oddest Words. 'When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.'