There Is No Silence

I'm a few hours away from taking a pretty big test, so this is a nice stress reliever. Last night on a break I did my usual Friday night thing of juicing up on an energy drink, smoking and taking a little walk around. After all the studying and tension, it was nice to be up late at night and have something remind me why I put up with the stupid 3-ring circus of academia.

Becoming a Redwood

Dana Gioia

Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds   
start up again. The crickets, the invisible   
toad who claims that change is possible,


And all the other life too small to name.   
First one, then another, until innumerable
they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.


Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,   
fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers
snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.


And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone   
can bear to be a stone, the pain
the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust.


Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,   
rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall
and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.


The old windmill creaks in perfect time
to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,   
and the last farmhouse light goes off.


Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt   
these hills and packs of feral dogs.
But standing here at night accepts all that.


You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,   
moving more slowly than the crippled stars,   
part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,


Part of the grass that answers the wind,
part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows   
there is no silence but when danger comes.

This is something that — once again — seems like it's about nature; it's really about people in the natural world. If I want to learn how a flower thinks or feels or behaves, we have botanists or science essayists or at least Discovery Channel to give us those insights in non-threatening, digestible portions. I don't want that from a poem: I want it to give me something effing ineffable. Mission accomplished.