SILENCE: A NOISY FINITUDE

 

SILENCE: A NOISY FINITUDE

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 woods edge 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 quiet shore.

It is troths like these that will not last, nothing

endures. The silence can only become a whimper,
the roar riding on the waning wind, a stifled bang
calling attention to a lonely end of a noisy finitude.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

Mississauga, August 30, 2013