In the Beginning

Words have lost their music, or so I hear.

Perhaps they never had any, or so they say.

I will never forget a soldier to whom I said,

“What is the most beautiful song you have ever heard?”

He stopped his talk, and looked at me in quiet,

For a precious half-a-second, before he replied,

“It never occurred to me that music could

Be beautiful.” Perhaps that is the point.

Words retain the music, but we’ve lost the ear

Because we’ve lost (or chased away) our silence.

Our silence? As if it were ever ours.

The Word draws power from the Silence Before The World,

The only power that is, the power of Music

The Music which is the Lord and Giver of Life.

When we become quiet, we begin to do the same,

But neither the words, nor the quiet, are ours;

And certainly not the Music which Is between.

Rather, we are Theirs, or else we simply are not.

Our words are lego miniatures of the Word

And even in them we play with Holy Fire.

If there be not music, then let silence reign

Or at least the rehearsal, barely attended to

By children playing bagpipes, violins,

Trumpets, drums and flutes, in eager cacophony

Always sharp, or flat. Some are merely young.

Others are always trying to play the wrong tune,

Or play their favorite tune at the wrong time.

Some expect they will likely do well enough

When the time comes, so they distract themselves

With sidebar talk; And some just like the noise.

Dead men fill the air with the burden of talk

Zombie conversations about nothing

And I, being dead myself, am fully complicit

In filling and killing the silence with empty talk

Struggling to empty words of all their silence

Lest we find ourselves confronted by

The aweful reality of nothing to say.

So conversations deaden, bore and stultify,

Wilt the critical function and reconfirm

Me in my headlong flight from bright reality.

This is not the courage of the bulwark picnic

In the cancer ward; nor yet the Socratic libation

Poured out for the gods; nor even of shaking the hand

Of a pretty girl. This is only fear

Conspiring to (just-so-happen-to) look

Out the other window at that precise time

As we pass the camo jacket with the cardboard sign,

As if we fear that poverty might be contagious.

Of course it is, but what we do not see

Is that we are already infected, and quite terminal.

Against all this we raise our timeless chats

Over tea and toast around the kitchen table;

Amid beer and pipes of aromatic smoke

In the cool of the evening, when the ancient garden echoes

Softly in the mind, tingeing words with music

Older than fig leaves. Conversations reach

Backwards and forwards into the now and always.

Silence dives still deeper in the single point

Where darkness dwells in unapproachable light.

Humility alone can bring us to this place.

Humility requires, demands, the incarnation

Of ineffable word in flesh of mortal deed.

The scandal of the particular is never more

Strongly felt than when at last we turn

From words to music, in this specific act

Of encountering the Word in scribbled sharpie ink

On a cardboard sign; or in the aching void

Between the lines of empty zombie talk;

And offering bread, not bread alone but Word

Eternally uttered forth from the Mouth of God.