Silent.

Chatham, Twilight in the Badlands, 1999

EVENING

How tranquilly the evening’s darkening,

dusk deepening beneath the trees.

Consult the long alleyways of the skies

for the gift of this evening

and the cause of your ease.

But the waste! the pain and stress –

those reachings into secrets of the dark –

quarrying endlessness,

plummeting bottomlessness,

quizzing every question mark.

Why this rummaging into whence and why?

Empty let’s be. Open and free.

Let secrets come, or let them fly

away, diffuse like cloudscapes

or whisperings through a tree.

Eyes must glow as your spirits peer

through a wakeful cranny in where you are.

Only the silent have ears to hear.

When the doorstep feels the touch of a toe

only the vigilant’s door is ajar.

Aaro Hellaakoski