POEM #8: Wave
a very, very quiet poem about my daughter
Today, a very, very quiet poem—quiet, both in the sense of no apparatus of audio production, either supporting or suppressing it (no rocket ships, no singing birds)—and also in the sense that this is a very small poem, about a very quiet and bittersweet moment with my youngest daughter, who, at the time couldn’t even talk yet.
You know, I’m kind of writing a torrent in this Gods of the Future Will Be Machines series, I realize that—it can be a bit much, for all of us, not just me: to read, to write, to think about. The Machine asserts itself as something real, but it’s not, really—a passing dream. The original condition of the Earth was great silence—broken, softly only, by God’s “Let there be,” “Let there be” — and, at the end, the Sabbath rest of all things.
The final condition of the Earth will also be great silence—not the silence of thermodynamic heat death, but again of Sabbath rest.
Silence is what it sounds like when something’s real.
So I’m going to stop talking now & here’s the poem: