Elaine Maria Upton

Silence ll

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By Elaine Maria Upton

Silence is not a lack of words.
Silence is not a lack of music.
Silence is not a lack of curses.
Silence is not a lack of screams.
Silence is not a lack of colors
or voices or bodies or whistling wind.
Silence is not a lack of anything.

Silence is resting, nestling
in every leaf of every tree,
in every root and branch.
Silence is the flower sprouting
upon the branch.

Silence is the mother singing
to her newborn babe.
Silence is the mother crying
for her stillborn babe.
Silence is the life of all
these babes, whose breath
is a breath of God.

Silence is seeing and singing praises.
Silence is the roar of ocean waves.
Silence is the sandpiper dancing
on the shore.
Silence is the vastness of a whale.
Silence is a blade of grass.

Silence is sound
And silence is silence.
Silence is love, even
the love that hides in hate.

Silence is the pompous queen
and the harlot and the pimp
hugging his purse on a crowded street.

Silence is the healer dreaming
the plant, the drummer drumming
the dream. It is the lover’s
exhausted fall into sleep.
It is the call of morning birds.

Silence is God’s beat tapping all hearts.

Silence is the star kissing a flower.

Silence is a word, a hope, a candle
lighting the window of home.

Silence is everything –the renewing sleep
of Earth, the purifying dream of Water,
the purifying rage of Fire, the soaring
and spiraling flight of Air. It is all
things dissolved into no-thing–Silence
is with you always…..the Presence
of I AM

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They Have Become

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By Elaine Maria Upton

They Have Become….
word dreamer in ce*

No one lives here anymore,
and even ‘here’ is a word that hangs on
a memory swimming away with the westward cloud.

No one lives here anymore.
The wedding ritual is over
and the brides are gone.

They have pledged to walk ‘it is true’
everywhere always ’til death.
And now, its disappointing: there is no death.

No one lives here anymore.
There is no life–there is no death.
There are no brides, no you, no me.

The leaves of bushes and trees tremble in wind
and gray clouds sleepwalk across the sky.
Still, most days the sun burns everything.

No one lives here anymore.
The sun burns everything.
This is a desert, indifferent to rain.

The saguaro drank water centuries ago.
That was how it began. They stood
horizontal, in coyote’s eyes, eyes of the dream.

No one lives here anymore. No one
waters or drinks. The weather has become
what it always was: Earth, Wind, and Fire.

No one waters anymore. There is nothing
to purify, and only hunger that burns in the sun.
The corn has become what it always was:

The corn has become the servant/giver of sun.
No one lives here anymore. The brides
have turned all the Earth, have watered and drunk.

They do not live here anymore.
They have eaten the corn. They have become
the Water, the Wood, the Earth, the Wind, the Sun.

No one lives here anymore.
Listen to the buffalo ghost, the empty cornfield.
Listen to the wind in mountains, in leaves of trees.

Sail with the cloud. No one lives here anymore.
The turtle’s voice is as always: less than a whisper.
Listen: it is not death! The graves are light!

Listen to the corn. Listen!
They have eaten the corn. They have become
the Water, the Moon, the Earth, the Wind, the Sun.

5 July 1998

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No Poem

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By Elaine Maria Upton

No poem with jeweled words
visits me now. Only the hills,
silent and black on an afternoon
of clouds in an almost-spring,
when children’s laughter is swallowed
somewhere in schools, and you are away,
and the landlord’s black hound
lies sleeping in the awakening grass.

There are letters scattered
as if on the floor –orders to pay
fines, or report to the Registry,
to meet the dark gavel of deadlines,
and there are prohibitions, posted
from someone without a face, without
a signature or name. Yet, if I wait
the spring leaves will write themselves,

the scripts of trees filling the hills.
And the granite and quartz will grow
ever so slowly, rising between cedar
and pine. This is the orchestra
of legato, while the daffodils play a quick
stacatto, and mosquitoes sleep at the window.
Perhaps soon the black hound will wake, bark,
run, like my heart, when you come home.

Lenox, Massachusetts
16 April 1999

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For Anna Akhmatova

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February 1986, on the twentieth anniversary of her death

You, who sang so many poets
and the death of cities and the young century,
your songs have kept us awake when
we should have died.

And may i now living, listen in your release
of the mute screams of a hundred mothers,
waiting before the prison wall,
their lips gone ‘blue with cold.’

What is it to endure just one winter,
the childhood willow choked in ice,
the Neva rolling on alone,
or night that teases you, but never comes?

What, to endure your own beauty?
The clap of tall black boots, not dancing naked
feet on the stairs? Your heart beating for a word?
Oh, but the long , dark cloud

–it passes. This day is reborn in your arms!
And sometime, I’ll wear your profile,
like a reticent god, where trembling
you translate a different star!

~ elaine maria upton
1986 (Boston, Massachusetts)-1999 (Hyde Park, New York)