Between Silence and Words

the silence beneath the bark / le silence sous l'écorce from joanna lurie on Vimeo.

There once was a war - one between a word and silence. Word felt it was the hope that the world needed, not the silence that befell before and after it. The word could be anything, it thought. It certainly, regardless of the capacity, would be far more empowering than silence, it believed. Silence remained, well, silent. It chose to let the word do the talking, quite literally, while it remained steadfast, ever strong and ever calm. The thing about silence wasn't that here was word telling it, belittling it, making it all the more omnipresent.

Silence remembered the time before, when the first word showed itself. Silence knew that the word wasn't the first enemy it faced, it was something else and that by default, silence would, like the eventuality of life, or death, win this war. All it had to do was let word play itself, twist itself, hurt itself, kill itself. Silence would be fine, as it always has been. Like the mountains, silence thought, it would be fine - that no matter how tall the trees would grow, after a point, the mountain would just tower over. The trees would have to take a beating retreat. The trees would see their place in the scheme of things. Trees would have to bow down. The mighty mountains deserve that respect. 

So, in that fight that had now engulfed silence and word, the word seemed to be winning. It had almost begun its victory lap while a crowd of exclamations cheered it. The word felt on the top of the world. After all, the exclamations made it powerful, right? The more exclamations, the more masterful the word would be. So, it decided to do the unthinkable – it thought to multiply. More words would drown silence and the pages that they would now reside in would be less silent. It, like the night, had to end, and end right now.

They came together, they listened to the word and joined together with their pitchforks of commas and colons; they had grown big. They thought they had won now, like the Jamaican runners in the tag team. But silence now laughed – at the joke that had played itself right now. 

Words, like trees, they reach out to the sky, to fill its silence.

Silence looked at the word, ever screaming, ever scheming, and said, with a smile – I am everywhere. Look around you. I am the reason why you even are needed in the first place. You are needed when I can’t be understood anymore, like a 2^nd grade citizen. I am on every page you aspire to fill, which every poet, every author hopes to make sense of, when they aren't able to put their minds to fill every corner of the page. Remember, I am the mountain and you are the tree.

You are nothing. Everything is me.