by Michael Brett
In the second silence -in the hollow cup- between
Three clock hands and an instant.
In Europe,
The giant tortoise silence
Lives in palace squares
Where kings and generals
Inspect their troops,
And wave to people from gold carriages.
Rectangular silences
Cushion the diamonds in bank deposit boxes.
They fill the spaces between gold bangles and girls' wrists.
They swim
Like jellyfish, and squeeze
Precisely into churches,
Prayer books
And expensive clothes shops
Where small silences live in thimbles
And cuff link boxes.
To attack power is to attack silence.
Bombs are binary:
They divide the fruit peel silence
Round a pitted, cut glass zero.
They divide the world
-Sometimes eras-
Into before and after.
The first precedes
The instant. It lies
Between the switch
And the explosion.
It is a spark
That can last forever.
~
Copyright © 2010 - Michael Brett
Published: 7/1/10 · Author's Page · Next Poem