Snow

 

Lucy Almy-Bird

 

 Snow

 

What is it to talk about silence?

When I look up from my table

it will still be there

where it fell in the night,

 

hurrying to congregate

in the cone cast by the streetlamp,

 

and in the darkness, the others,

unseen but legion.

 

How bruise-blue the shadows

on the garden

 

and the frozen cobwebs 

snapped beneath their weight.

In the park we blundered 

across it, the quiet,

in spite of its exclamatory outline

on bare trees,

down great hushed halls of white

and the white lake picked out in kanji

by the moorhen's feet.

Are there words for what I felt

in the faceted garden?

Motes, corpuscles, animalcules.

 

And it is a relief to feel it touch me

with its meaning,

it's vast multitudinous silence,

again and again.

Catriona O'Reilly

Geis (2015)

 

I love that, "in the darkness, the others, unseen but legion" - 

or - "down great hushed halls of white".

 

"Are there words for what I felt?"

 

That truly is the question. 

In the mutitudinous presence of such artistry, 

what response can there be, but silence?

Silence and wonder.