When
they who came
before me, and you, and we,
immersed the temple,
centered
in our town’s square,
with thousands of years
told as eagle-eyed eons
of culture
and our human
utterances and acts,
with there
the executions
against
its outer northern wall:
blue
a birth
below
its southern colored stained glass:
red
with
its rebuilt
after
the great fire:
green
and
then again
following
the dreadful invasion:
indigo
there
might be
a yellowing narrative
or two
I or you could distill in stillness, white
in an expansive sense,
from its walls and artifacts
and curved brown whisper-walls.
However,
it has remained eerily quiet,
not one grayish word,
yet to reply us
in vocalizations
of English, French,
caramel Cantonese,
or x, y or z.
Neither
the ant colony
under
its thousand years old tree
nor
the tree
have spoken to us
nor
the decaying
lady’s slipper
stuck
beneath that thick crusty root.
And yet, and yet,
stories
sprout and stream
as richly colored
as Blue Tango
or Hawaiian Hibiscus
into our brain
when we simply
swirl our eyes
listening across this scene
where silences
became
artifice and art
as a loud landscape
of paused hush
—animasuri’23
Thank you, Ms. Borg, for bringing silence, paused in between and at endings prolonged.