Ra-Deo Silence Poem by Mary Champion

Why don't you speak to me any more
when there is so much still I'm searching for?
Why won't your inspiration flow
to make more sense of what I know?
Why are you silent, night and day?
Do you have nothing left to say?

I wonder, lost without my guide;
the voice that spoke from deep inside
and, in the vacant, silent space,
the nightmares rush to take your place.

There was a time, before you made
me turn to you, when all arrayed,
the outer world filled every sense
and quenched my mind with facts from whence
you built a revelation bold
and large enough this Truth to hold.

But though the outer world still teems
with facts and fantasies and dreams,
I find it speaks to me no more,
nor fills my senses as before.
For all my focus has its view
on that blank space which once held you.
But you are gone, the light has died,
I have no aim, I have no guide.
And in that vacant, silent space
the nightmares rush to take your place.

Eternal and unwritten laws
that have no purpose and no cause,
permit no vacuum to persist,
each must be filled with ghost or grist.
But once you moved to set it right,
you filled the void with Truth and Light.
You showed me what was real and true.
You filled the world with meaning too.
But now you're gone and in your stead
the nightmares rush to fill my head.

The vigour that I once applied
to studying the world outside,
has lost its urgency and sense
to apathetic indolence
and in that starkly empty space
the nightmares rush to take your place.