To be a poet, or a lover,
or to fight for justice
in the world,
you must develop
a love affair
with silence:
you must long to press
your body into it,
that primal home.
The flow of music's majesty
emerges from silence.
Colors are conceived in silence
which dreams the form of things.
And isn't it silence
that opens to the quiet-cored soul
the storehouse
of all meaning,
of grief, of ecstasy--
the essence of Spirit?
I have found that the soul's senses
wake up in a baptism
of sustained silence.
When silence brims over
the soul weeps or laughs.
When the body lays down and dies
the soul stands up in silence,
and sings.