Morning Voices
This morning’s raucous quiet: din of a lawnmower
Pulse-like swell of cicadas chattering in the brush
Trucks grumbling along a nearby highway.
Under a sea of high thin clouds, a sheer ocean of sky
The dead are islands: an archipelago
Of mute echoes, of resonant silence
Their voices still within this gorgeous commotion—
Crow call, water burbling, wind rough in trees—
In a weed’s play, against skin, in the heart’s vibrations.
Under the racket of this day’s distractions
Under the birds’ clamorous singing
Under lapping waves of noise
Their stopped tongues their stilled voices speaking.
Credit
Copyright © 2017 by Ed Falco. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 24, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
About this Poem
“The loved ones we lose to time—family, friends, mentors, students, neighbors, lovers—remain with us in our thoughts, a part of the fabric of our selves. ‘Morning Voices’ is a poem of mourning and morning, of mourning for those lost to us in the flesh of their being, of awakening to the way they remain with us nonetheless, in the weave of who we are, speaking to us at the start of another gifted, noisy morning.”
—Ed Falco
Author
Ed Falco
Ed Falco is the author of Wolf Moon Blood Moon, forthcoming from Lousiana State University Press in December 2017.
Date Published
11/24/2017