September 2019
Mary McCarthy
mmccarthy161@gmail.com
mmccarthy161@gmail.com
Bio-note: I am a former Registered Nurse who finds herself unable to watch the world suffer without desperately wanting to heal it, often overwhelmed by the magnitude and horror of events that seem to have gone beyond the point of no return, despite the voices raised in protest. Silence is not acceptable, and yet sometimes there are no words. These poems try to understand some of the ways of silence, and the struggle to speak.
Speechless
This silence means either
there's nothing more to say
or so much it’s hard
to find words strong enough
to carry such a weight.
I can’t decide
if my hands are empty
because I have nothing
or because there’s so much
more than I could hold.
Either way it comes out
just the same,
in words and signs
that are at best a clumsy
approximation
of what I meant to say
before you got too far away
to hear me.
Today
My words are ghosts
always fading
Thin enough to see through
then suddenly thick as fog
covering the signs we need
to see the road
as hard to grasp as empty air
impossible to clear
without wind and sun enough
to burn it off
and leave the world behind--
Words run from me
like thieves escaping
from a robbery-
They grow hard as stones
on my tongue--
I can’t swallow them
or spit them out
without embarrassment
and my voice can’t get
around them--
I can only hope
you're watching close enough to know
I have not chosen silence
Listen
The whales are dying
washing up on beaches
floating dead in waters
grown too warm
they drown, tangled in nets
wounded and scarred
by boat strikes
their bellies full
of plastic trash
the song of their long grief
threading through the deeps
their story’s end a terrible
loneliness
reaching back to when
they first returned to ocean
now so few left
to hear the songs
so few to sing
and no one
left to do more
then count the dying and the dead
Remember
extinction’s nothing new
all come to it
soon or late
great and small
even the stars die
deaths so spectacular
they punch a hole
in the fabric of the universe
taking all they can
with them as they go
leaving behind a hungry rupture
swallowing all
that comes close enough to grab-
and yet in our small compass
we grieve our losses
even the ones we made
with greed and pride and carelessness
too late to recover
more than a shadow of the lost
Speechless
This silence means either
there's nothing more to say
or so much it’s hard
to find words strong enough
to carry such a weight.
I can’t decide
if my hands are empty
because I have nothing
or because there’s so much
more than I could hold.
Either way it comes out
just the same,
in words and signs
that are at best a clumsy
approximation
of what I meant to say
before you got too far away
to hear me.
Today
My words are ghosts
always fading
Thin enough to see through
then suddenly thick as fog
covering the signs we need
to see the road
as hard to grasp as empty air
impossible to clear
without wind and sun enough
to burn it off
and leave the world behind--
Words run from me
like thieves escaping
from a robbery-
They grow hard as stones
on my tongue--
I can’t swallow them
or spit them out
without embarrassment
and my voice can’t get
around them--
I can only hope
you're watching close enough to know
I have not chosen silence
Listen
The whales are dying
washing up on beaches
floating dead in waters
grown too warm
they drown, tangled in nets
wounded and scarred
by boat strikes
their bellies full
of plastic trash
the song of their long grief
threading through the deeps
their story’s end a terrible
loneliness
reaching back to when
they first returned to ocean
now so few left
to hear the songs
so few to sing
and no one
left to do more
then count the dying and the dead
Remember
extinction’s nothing new
all come to it
soon or late
great and small
even the stars die
deaths so spectacular
they punch a hole
in the fabric of the universe
taking all they can
with them as they go
leaving behind a hungry rupture
swallowing all
that comes close enough to grab-
and yet in our small compass
we grieve our losses
even the ones we made
with greed and pride and carelessness
too late to recover
more than a shadow of the lost
© 2019 Mary McCarthy
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