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Walking down the steep hill
winding down the stairs to the river, I would rise early each day to steal a piece of the silence of the new day, share with the mallards my rhubarb coffee cake see the snake as he lay on the rock sunning himself in the new dawn and the quiet of the wild world waking up and me with it... the peace of it all. I was eight years old sipping my milk-laced black coffee and drinking in the silences. Lying in my narrow bed on the third floor of the boarding house in college with all those other sleeping girls... it would be late at night the whistling of the trains would penetrate the deepness of the late summer night... and I would hear the lonely silences stepping in between, the echoing of the whistles made me wonder where the trains would going, and where I could go if I were on one traveling into the great vastness of the American landscape... a kind of tangled wilderness, that had once been so wild... and longing for that wildness and me listening and longing for that wildness that was there contained in the silences. Studying for ten hours at a time. I would compose my 5000 level term papers in a cramped sound-proofed room I'd reserved in the West Bank Library. There was a high window which afforded me a view of the campus and a small span of the Mississippi. This room had narrow turreted view which gave me a bird's-eye view of the world below. When I couldn't find the right words, my mind would wander to the silent moving world below.... I imagined those people advising me and then the words would come and the papers suddenly began to magically write themselves and became whole in the silences. Reading was my favorite childhood preoccupation. Why? Because it took me places, and eventually, literally up a tree. As a child I often climbed up into the crook of our apple tree in our front yard with a book. In Spring, when the tree was in full bloom, I was as hidden as a Cheshire Cat and twice as satisfied. when the wind blew, the tree rocked. the branch was a perfect vee, there was no danger of falling...my seat was at the top of the tree. This tree became my secret room. It was if I had closed the door, and I was all alone in my own house. It was, for me, complete happiness up there in the silences. In North Dakota, the Prairie Wind does a lot of talking. In a winter blizzard, it howls piteously. In fall, it whooshes with unexpected gusts. In spring, it caresses gently and murmurs, cooing like a zephyr. But, in summer it is changeful. The wind gathers violence and vengeance, turning the sky an ugly pea green and filling it with roiling turbulent anvil-shaped clouds that can twist into a tornado which shreds everything in it path. Afterwards, the quiet is palpable. You can almost touch it on its shoulder. Hear it sigh with relief. And then, there is a complete shattering shuttering silence. The business and the busy-ness of the world are truly over-rated, I think. I takes the silences to find out who and where you are. Copyright January 9, 2015 All Rights Are Reserved By This Author Written and (thought) directly onto the page, will return to edit later All poetry/prose/ideas/rants are the explicit legal property of this writer Copyright Meloo/Melissa A. Howells straight from her Tilt-a-World re-edited on January 27, 2015/ performed open mic January Vote for this poem |
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