SILENCE

SILENCE

This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper. ---From “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot 

By sundown, they will be gone, like long shadows

on my porch walls. All the fierce singing done,

what remains is the quiet murmur of the bourn.

Its stream will not return, nor will the swallows. 

But while they flitted from tree tops to broken

perches, did they not cry out their bravest songs?

These are our elm trees, these are our willows,

we pieced our homes here together, we roosted. 

At the bluffs, we find the edge of the woods muted

now. Soon, even the cackling gulls will dive a final

swoon, catch the last crayfish lost on boulders left

bare by ebbing tide that must also leave its shore. 

It is troths like these that will not last, nothing

endures. The silence can only become a whimper.

---Albert B. Casuga

07-29-11

Prompt: This morning it hits me: how silent the woods have become now with most of the migrants done singing their fierce but temporary attachments.---Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 07-29-11