Haibun

"Some things are best left unsaid and this, being my last, is one of them."

 

The reader, taken aback, takes the poet to task. "Again you repeat the irrelevance of words amid the ocean's roar as we navigate the beach's darkness by the light of the stars.  What is the meaning again of this coincidence of place?"

 

 

The Unknown Poet quotes gravely at last:

 

        Voices, voices. Listen my heart, as only saints

have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them

clear off the ground. Yet they went on, impossibly,

kneeling, completely unawares: so intense was

their listening. Not that you could endure

the voice of God -far from it! But listen

to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message

that forms itself out of silence.

 

As dawn comes upon the reader the following words come to mind:

 

          It was her voice that made   

The sky acutest at its vanishing.   

She measured to the hour its solitude.   

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,   

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,   

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her   

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

 

 

"Why?" he wails. "Why must the singing end? What are the order of words that give such flesh to the song?"

 

 

 

 

            along the strand 

crab bubbles

here and there