Songs Without Words

Many of the Asian poets I came to admire had been banished into exile . . . unlike them, I chose mine.

 

 

 

we knock upon silence

for an answering music

      Lu Chi

 

And you think that perhaps you are not who you thought, that

Any idea of yourself must include a body surrounding a song.

      Mark Strand, "A Suite Of Appearances"

 

  

Thinking exile would be silence and solitude

Once these years ago now when I had left

All I had known for what seemed better then

Because unknowable I followed the cutbank

Back to where it lowered and leveled into

The woods and then to where the spring rose

And fell a little into a spill-pool and fell again

To a slip of a stream more stones than water

And from nearby a cardinal called and farther

Came the answer, back and forth and again

And again, the first calling more and more quickly,

Song and undersong, until both had come

To the one harmony of their shared story as

The stream gathered and sang over the stones.

 

 

 (Rock Springs woods)

 





Poetry by countryfog
Read 649 times
Written on 2014-12-11 at 16:16

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Once, many years ago, I went with some friends to a huge nature reserve in Canada; Algonquin Park I think it was called. The night we first stopped hiking and made camp, I noticed something that I couldn't quite pin down at first. It turned out to be Silence. True, there were still noises: the rustle of leaves that small animals make, maybe a bird or two, the croak of a frog in the river. But it was a sound devoid of the hum of refrigerators, the whir of highway traffic, the cacophony of alarm clocks. It was a different kind of noise. I noticed also that my fellow hikers seemed to talk more quietly, as if in a church or temple.
2014-12-14


Lawrence Beck The PoetBay support member heart!
An interesting piece, Fog. Exile was attained, but silence and solitude didn't come with it.
2014-12-14



You write from such a peaceful place, sage words filled with beauty. I like your introduction. Choosing exile is difficult but very appealing at times.
2014-12-13