In The Whispering Gallery
By Kei Miller
In The Whispering Gallery
by Kei Miller
Brought low, you will speak from the ground; your speech will mumble out of the dust. Your voice will come ghostlike from the earth; out of the dust your speech will whisper.
I.
Come now and see a trick:
say something to what might seem
like silence – which is to say, a wall,
its quiet sprawl of bricks.
And let your words themselves
be soft as silence; now wait.
What you thought no one would hear,
will find an ear –
will travel round and round.
The bricks you thought might muffle
sound, in fact bears your voice
whole and distinct.
And what is this if not prayer,
the way we speak to what might seem
like silence, which is to say, god,
her quiet sprawl of sky, or just
her chamber of bricks, and how
our desperate syllables of dust,
the words we thought no one would hear
are in fact borne up, and never lost.
II.
After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.
You will find her, not in the fire
that skipped smooth as stones island to island,
Portugal then across the arc
of archipelagos, Madeira, Porto Santo, Desertas
You will find her, not in the wind,
its furious funnel, the tornado that snapped
the buildings of Jiangsu,
98 people dead;
You will find her, not in the sea, its salt
or squall; how even the calm Mediterranean
can close over the floating shanties
and suck them down.
You will find her, not in the blood,
the bodies, the spent bullets of Orlando;
not in the slipped mountains of Sao Paulo,
the marauding mud,
Not in the heat waves or the hurricanes,
or the earthquakes – Italy wobbling
Like an untuned TV; not in the airplanes
that fall like flies;
But here. Just here.
In the Whispering Gallery.
She is here.
III.
And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him!
Consider then this cathedral, its dome
and its crypt – the once loud lives
that now only whisper, the muted script
of soldiers and kings, of poets
and priests, reduced now
to the softest of syllables of themselves,
And yet they have been heard
And yet they have changed the world.
And what I mean to say is –
In this loud world, be not afraid
of the quiet, of the stillness, of the low
humming night, of the sleeping birds,
of the moments that stretch wide
as horizons, when we might hear
our own selves, our own painful hearts roaring
For there too we might hear
The faintest whisper of some god.
Come now and see a trick:
say something to what might seem
like silence – which is to say , a wall,
its quiet sprawl of bricks –
Commissioned by Poet in the City and St Paul’s Cathedral for Under the Skin 2016 ©
