Word

As the warm, still afternoon cooled, evening began its gathering of shadows, and a breeze arose. At dusk the breeze stiffened and shook the leaves and set the pines swaying. By the time the sky had turned dark and the moon mottled the scattered clouds, the jasmine air had grown still again, and the trees mute.

The night now seems as brittle as clear glass, as though movement might cause it to shatter and rain moonlit shards over the world. There is something behind the silence, and the attentive trees appear to be waiting for a secret to be revealed. The moon's arc approaches its zenith.

Suddenly vertiginous, I see it instead as a bright pendulum swung from an earth suspended above a dark sea, the clouds a flotsam of drifting foam. All will fall into that silence. Will no one speak?


( Sunday Verse )