A Single Silence Forever Poem by Shalom Freedman

A SINGLE SILENCE FOREVER


I hear a poem in me
It comes suddenly
Like the lightning flash of fear
We cannot run away from
When darkness is our only memory.
.
Why we live and why we die
What we are and what we dream
All that means so much
And has been said so many times before
Again rehearses itself here
And I hear it and re-hear it and re- hear it again
Because I know and only I know who I am not and will never be.

The fading stars and the distant lines
The signals of another world so far from us we will never really be in
All that is beyond and without sense and without meaning
And which we will never understand
Speaks and cannot be heard.

I am trying to say I heard a poem in me
But what I truly heard
Was only the sound
Of who I am
A single silence forever upon the hidden ruins of time.