The Voice of Nothingness is Not Silent

Keep listening. Repetition is the rhythm of a harmonious narrative.

________

Grandma paces across the massive floor space. Such a humungous house is a crime to live in alone. This is the end, after more than half a lifetime, and he’s gone. The family remembers him well. He used to sit, unmoving, for immeasurable hours in that chair by the fireplace. 

My dad, begrudging this unseemly fact of life, is bent on taking out all the young folk (now almost in their thirties) to the grocery store, “to get whatever you want!” As we board the car, I can’t think of anything more to want than for us all to be together again, though I suppose even the Lutheran God would deem that otherwise. 

When we’ve all gone through the supermarket aisles, I’m left alone, at a loss to find exactly what I’m looking for, I trudge hell-bent through the fruits and vegetables. Everything’s rotten. 

Again, my vegetarianism is marginalized in the family, I can’t choose between swollen cantaloupe and mangled lettuce any more than I can between two cuts of meat, it all seems inedible to me. Everyone leaves the store without me. 

I walk the highways indefinitely, then, finally after a swathe of nights changing traces overhead with sunrays, I am bled of fictitious impersonality before the might of the great city ahead. The parks are filthy, and an ongoing fair only cements the fact. 

At a chess table I find my old friend from Sudan. He is indifferent, though welcoming. We move here and there amid the goings-on, attaining food and drink in our path, as we sight our circumstances and in the usual mode of conversation, dastardly criticize the milieu and technological demonry of our host society, brandishing bitter tongues of aging cynicism and spite. 

I again leave the scene, suddenly struck with a sense of purpose, to see my own Love, first-hand. 

________

In the reared tragedy of common history
Gone from the Irish shores that reach into the heart of a small mayflower
Lore teaching the youth and middle-aged men of their rights
                    And losing fate in the unreasonable song


To play out our entrenched groove that rides into spherical motion,
A dreamless awe maintaining the earthy power to cool enraged throats
                    And impress a soft layer of peace on the back
          An all-escaping flesh
                              Of our siblings who praise the sun
                                         And its ever-flowing majesty

- excerpt from "Along My Own Shore"