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.