Silence Part 3: The Weight of Pure Moonlight

In every world spirituality, the path

to confront one’s own God, one’s

own soul, one’s own calling- that

path is a rich tonal tapestry whose

warp and weft are woven of silence

and contemplation.

 

We travel and move, not to change

our location so much as to

re-enter the spaces between

threads. She thought she could

leave behind an old way of being,

the disillusion of the first world,

the sense of abandonment.

 

But we always build new castles’

foundations with the stones

we carry between continents.

Entire oceans can fit between

memories, our understanding

only reaches as deep as the

person to our left.

 

She contemplates the ways in which

her lover uses silence as a weapon,

setting the table with barbed wire

and glass topped walls between

seats and plates, filling wine glasses

with distilled indifference. He cannot

comprehend her stillness, her need.

He never wanted to meet her God.

 

It has never been easy to navigate

any world with a map made

in a different one. Like a moth, she

draws ever nearer to the flame

of the ones who use a comfortable

silence as a bridge; who place pebbles

of stillness in her open hand, like so

many emeralds excavated from so

many subterranean chambers.

 

Once upon a time, she filled her

suitcase with 1000 such treasures,

each carrying the weight of importance

tied to the ground. When she flew a

kite into the sun, everything melted-

only the weight of pure moonlight

remained, flowing into silent places

in her heart like liquid silver, mending

the cracks in 1000 broken dreams. 1000

ways to fill a life with the word of God.

Author's Note

Part 3 of 3 poems written for a writin exercise, a meditation on the theme of silence. I chose to write from the perspective of a woman who is a migrant navigating a land other than her own.

Original was written and posted in Spanish, and can be found here:
http://www.writerscafe.org/writing/zorra_encantada/1930138/

Photo is my own, the moon over our city