Words: Clare Dwyer Hogg
Image: Barney Beech
You wouldn’t call it silence.
Not at first.
There’s a tinny plastic tune
Near.
And far,
The drone of spitting fume.
But close:
Silence.
Not the silence of absence,
That bitter landscape
Where things like clocks
Sound loudest,
Each bark
A mark
On linear paths
Victorians called progress.
(They liked improvement too,
Forever fixing and altering:
Stone chipped into fountains,
Underground streams damned
For tinkling spray
From mouths of marble fish.)
No, not that kind of silence
Where empty is filled
With the march
Away.
It’s the fullness of space,
This silence.
The entirety of a moment
With everything
That has been and will be.
The flit of wind around a leaf,
Rock on mountain,
Soil beneath soil beneath soil.
The noise outside,
Lineage unknown –
Or this:
Silence imbued.
Like sea heard in the shell held close,
You have to imagine it
Into being
To find
It was there
All along.
