Chiseling Silence  

From today’s yesterday,

memory, a moth-eaten quilt sewn by ghosts,

remains wrapped around the bones of childhood still warm with echo.

Chalk-dusted sidewalks hold firm

where rubber balls ricochet like laughter,

marbles roll beneath floorboards like forgotten dreams,

and sneakers thread joy into the seams of summer.

To the city’s pulse,

taxi horns scream like impatient heartbeats,

subway rails groan like old bones,

pigeons coo lullabies to concrete gods,

and sailboats drift across Central Park’s lake like paper prayers on water.

Returning to the hearth of touch:

a mother’s lullaby echos in enjambment,

a father’s silence tucks between stanzas,

a grandfather’s wisdom etches in ellipses,

a grandmother’s faith stitches into the hem of every closing line.

And along comes grief…

A violin string stretched across the ribcage relying on faith,

a lantern hung in the mouth of a cave.

Such becomes the driftwood of time,

each word a candle lit in the aura of silence,

each stanza a tombstone carved with breath,

each revision a ritual of resurrection.

The past…

Warding off suffocation in a mausoleum where memory sleeps in velvet-lined coffins

of locked drawers, a poem awaits the end of a burning house.

Pages of verse curl like commas before the end

as the writer strokes the keys immersed in embers of a dying fire.

Such is a final phrase, its premise flickering,

falling through vaporous fog.

His breath becomes ellipses trailing into the void,

while through his fading pulse,

words remain constellations of keystrokes suspended in the cloud’s ether.

Immortal as satellites mapping the ache of strangers, words refuse death.

They archive the soul.

They outlive the pulse.

They are the breath after breath is gone.

The finished sculpture of one man’s peace.