Skip to main content

Sounds of Silence


The Communion of Silence


Silence, with sails double reefed,
Creeps into shoal water.

A hand touches another.
Two heads turn.
One winks.
The other smiles.

Silence, with all sails rigged,
Beats out of shoal water.

A glance points homeward;
A hand spins the wheel.

Later, the sea, in ungentle waves,
Tries to beguile them.

Neither notice.


Carl Potter


*****

It's National Poetry Month, April. For several years now, our small town library has hosted a workshop with a University of Vermont professor/poet who lives in town. I joined the group this year. Carl, one of my writing buddies, also joined and shared this poem with the group. He has a very romantic sensibility.

He was nice enough to let me post his poem here. I had been thinking about my experience with the sounds of silence and now I have the little push I needed to sit down and write about it.



*****

Mike and I have had been fortunate in our opportunities to travel around various parts of the United States, and we have had some great trips. I think, though, our one trip out of the country has to be my favorite. We spent July, 2003, touring New Zealand, mostly the South Island. I can't even come up with words for how spectacular the whole place was, even in wintertime. We were constantly picking our chins up off the ground. A month is not enough time to spend there.

We had a couple of day trips in Fiordland National Park. Fiordland is mostly wilderness and all but impenetrable--mountain peaks and fiords carved by glaciers, thick rainforest vegetation. Milford Sound is about the only fiord accessible by car, but we had to re-schedule plans because they first time we tried to get there, the road had been closed by avalanche.

We went to Doubtful Sound, further to the south. Getting there involved getting a boat ride across a large lake and then a bus ride over a forbidding mountain pass. We then got on another, larger boat to cruise down the sound. Before turning the boat around for the trip back to the wharf, the captain stopped and turned off the boat's engine. He urged the group (maybe twenty of us altogether) to listen to the sounds of silence in this unspoiled and remote wilderness. It has to be the most peaceful spot on earth.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I appreciate readers' comments so much. You don't even always have to agree with me.

Popular posts from this blog

It's TIme

 It's been a while since I have posted anything and even my reading your posts is falling by the wayside. I am in Florida now. I have a yard where little attention was spent on landscaping for the past years so I am slowly and (somewhat) methodically addressing that. I also volunteer to work at the pollinator garden and the edible garden I helped install at the UU grounds and I took over the volunteer job of cleaning out the overgrown community garden by my neighborhood mailboxes. The neighbor who was doing that got sick and could no longer attend to it. It's a bigger job than I'd thought at first -- not only overgrown with weeds, but the plants that are wanted there are in life and death competition for each others' spaces. And two walks a day, morning and evening, so Levi can keep up with addiction to canine social media and a daily rousing came of stick or ball midday take up another chunk of my time. I have a weekly meditation group that I co-facilitate, and my own ...
10 comments
Read more

Life Goes On

There is nothing like a visit from the grand children to remind one that life goes on.  I spent Friday night at my daughter's and then brought the kids back home with me.  I did not get to see so much of them this past summer and it was a birthday gift to my daughter (who just turned 40!) to have a couple of days to herself. She probably spent them in her son's room playing Lego StarWars.  Dane tried to teach me how to play this video game--a hopeless task if ever there was one.  "Concentrate, Grandma!  You have to concentrate!"  I do have a hard time with sustained concentration lately, but in this case I had no clue what it was that needed concentration.  He finally took the controls away from me (thank-you!). It's amazing how long he can amuse himself at my house being out side on a scooter or helping me in the yard, especially if it involves a hose.  Inside, they both sit and draw or craft for hours.  Just before bed, Dane did say, "N...
41 comments
Read more

Eggplant

Mike and I considered ourselves soul mates, but we definitely were not culinary mates.  Mike liked what he liked and disliked what he disliked and he never changed his mind about things like that.  He did not eat mayonnaise.  He did not eat tomato sauce.  He did not eat cooked vegetables except for corn, peas and green beans.  He did not eat onions cooked or otherwise.  He did not eat casseroles ever since they were a combination of things he didn't eat anyway. I did not like mushrooms as a kid and eggplant just made me gag, but my tastes changed,  Foods I found disgusting as a child are now among my favorites--mushrooms, eggplant, avocados, asparagus, eggs, spinach, brussel sprouts, herbs and spices. I will admit that I never developed a taste for liver (nor do I want to). I made this Moussakka a while ago and ate it every day for a week.  I froze half of it but ended up thawing it out right away. It consists of sliced eggplant layered...
31 comments
Read more