Their White Elephant

Silence sits upon silence,

a mute accumulation;

minutes,

days,

months,

years,

a hush pervades them all.

He won’t acknowledge

the white elephant in the room,

so neither will she;

the stillness deafens,

the lulls clamour,

all resound

with secret censorship

that wails without sound in her heart,

pounds and crackles in his brain.

He looks at her with a nameless longing,

she cries noiselessly into midnight pillows –

but still, the stillness snags,

expanding the girth

of their

white elephant.

*

For more on this topic, visit Growing With God in My Garden

You’re Hard to Read

You’re hard to read;

complicated,

multi-faceted,

with cavernous depths untapped

by casual communication,

blotted missive,

dog-eared corners,

obscure references to images

buried in time and place,

needing a good dusting, an

Ephesian library.

What hidden treatise

lurks within your leaves?

You reduce me to an illiterate,

a picture-book primer to your Tolstoy;

what words do I use

to translate you to my heart?