The hurricane-waiting music remained,
echoing after the power surged and died.
A lullaby. I sleep.
No white noise machine, this anxious silence
winds into naptime dreams of storms with eyes.
Disorientation upon waking.
Light through the undamaged window. In the storm’s wake
I see cars, buildings and trees that remain
unscathed save scattered leaves and branches I
may well have seen there as summer dies
anyway. Unusually silent,
though, as if I were not alone in sleep.
And in this moment when Charleston sleeps,
the wind-imposed quiet reawakens
an older strain: God created silence
with a word he won’t repeat. He remains
mute as the wind passes and dies.
The voice isn’t in storm or fire. But I
strain my ears and don’t hear it here either.
Storm-driven rhythms I heard in my sleep
fade. I make myself still and small. Sound dies.
It’s as quiet as a hermit’s wake.
God remains
silent.
Easy enough to interpret silence
as grace. The hurricane skirts north. I
find relief and near jubilation my main
emotions as, unable to sleep,
I walk in the cool left by the hurricane’s wake
and manage to forget that people have died.
Knowing someone died,
am I meant to mimic God’s silence?
Change the tune to suit a wake,
though joy moves through me like a marching band high-
stepping through receding waters? Sleep
the sleep of the relieved who remain?
I won’t look you in the eye and say the silence has no shape; that it doesn’t insinuate.
Or that the sleeping and waking of grief and joy align well with propriety or with death.
All that remains tangled. Out of the quiet, though, the hurricane-waiting music resumes.