Elegy In Silence Poem by Stug Jordan

The dull wind, muffled in secrecy,
lays the low lines of the river
as the cold hand, dressed in leather,
holds the ropes of the bells still.

By the seeming-centuries of a barn,
the twitching necks of flowers
flirt between the passing of clouds.
By an abandoned plough, in decadence,

a world happens, as a greyness
sets into the sky, the rigour of a thorn
mimics, on the barrels of a new frost,
the quick eye of the jackdaw.

The mourners stand in silence;
a mother holds a child’s sniff
as the boots fix themselves in mud,
shuffling with the death quiet.

In the sermon of his sad face,
his words suffer on the yard’s breeze;
and his mouth hangs, like a trap,
where flies take themselves on cold days.

In the summoning of the myth,
of the lie, and of the absurd,
the soil of the age-decayed farms...
noiseless as it falls nether-ward.

They turn and leave as earth closes,
and a hushed rain shines its stones;
tapping dumb, tight-lipped,
onto the mute, grief-broken grass.

They disperse, as a dead-eyed pony
passes on the lane, tiptoeing.
The sun ignored the church this day,
and the close-by river, too, held its tongue.