“When earthly silence invades the stage, lights bright on vain actors’ game,
they burn out whites of rosy skin when they look up and out on sinking tides.
And falling leaves of yellowed vines stare out of comfort and beauty’s eyes.
In deeply troubled and unsettled time, a filling thought invades one’s mind.
The thought of speaking, nonetheless, to living, rotten tenderness.
The leaves decaying under silvery frost, smell of remorse and loss of trust.
As the scream of jays in oaks, hollow sounds and revolting thoughts
Thus makes us think of helpless cries, of children, untamed and wild,
battling nature’s cruel affray, different kinds, like a wave of sine, dead and alive,
populations of angels and devils decline. A speech, quiet in volume but loud in thought,
spills over the edge of a sweet little cup, and burns over the spectators’ row
of the makeshift marionette show.

Apart from all that, you and I, eye to eye, under water and over ice
Rely on flickering bursts of links in the night,
The bird, to speak in heavenly rhymes,
The cat, to talk in mystery lines,
The fish, to never talk at all
And the river, to swash us over,
Once and for all.”

Adrian Geller