Quiet is not silence. Silence is absolute like never and forever. Quiet invites attention to cicadas, the warbling vireo on the wire, the cardinal’s whistle as it wings its brightness over the horizon of the Blue Ridge Mountains, then disappears amid the crape myrtles’ baroque blossoms.
It almost speaks to me. / Then as Horizons step, I take a photograph of artists chatting on the gravel path that opens to the studio barn silos.
The rabbit lets me come close—It waits upon the lawn / It shows the furthest tree—before it leaps into tall grasses, shelter for fireflies.
The limestone statue of the cherubic naked boy smiles down at butterflies and bees feeding on zinnia pollen. Good are those who plant flowers to save our pollinators.
Yet I mourn. The air conditioning kicks in. I examine the light on the drainage bed of small stone—a narrow beach outside my glass door—and listen to the distance, the highway sounds rising and falling like wind in spring.
A quality of loss / Affecting our content, Emily Dickinson wrote.
Before bed, sitting beneath the gazebo’s white dome where there’s cell reception, I talk to my love. We’re interrupted by the long train passing by. Is it nostalgia to love the sound of trains? Is it forward-thinking looking back?
A fascist is president: infection in the sentence breeds. We can’t help talking about him.
The comedian says people can’t think when they’re afraid. Satire makes them laugh, forget their fear,
so they can think, a little newer for the term / upon enchanted ground.
Every day more evil against the Earth, the hate cult shouting epithets, hoarding their guns. As Trade had suddenly encroached / Upon a Sacrament.
When the artists gather for meals, they ask “How was your day?” which means, “Did you travel in your studio?” which translates into resistance beyond the borders of this quiet estate.
Copyright © 2025 by Aliki Barnstone. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 17, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
