Arts for the 21st Century

Where All Is Silence

You’re quiet today, Daddy, 

none of your usual defenses 

I could repeat word for word;

nor your lengthy sermons eclipsing 

all my efforts at some kind 

of closeness. 

We’ve been travelling wordlessly

across Brooklyn; these streets 

familiar to you, far away from

barefoot tracks, gullies, cart-roads; 

another world you left behind; 

chose to forget. 

I’ve been silent, too, on poems 

I wrote but never showed you: 

the one I called “His Holyness”

where, having made it into Heaven, 

you choose the mansion farthest from us.

Or the poem I named “Da Da.” 

Skilled in woodwork,

artist in your own right, 

you, like the Dadaists, carved 

out your resistance against 

the norms that tried to hold you, 

you chose your art, your skill,

the freedom you felt they stood for

above your own  (I will not say it!)  

I abandoned those poems 

not wanting to dishonor you.

We’re here now, Daddy. 

We’ve sung the last hymn 

and the last prayers have been said. 

They’re lowering your coffin 

into the grave where all is silence, 

the earth complicit as it covers you.

I, too, have no wish to uncover 

those spaces you tried filling 

with words that kept falling 

through. 

Your silences were kinder.