Nature is a noisy place
When you stop and listen.
Rarely silent, always shifting,
Rustling, growing,
Budding. blooming,
Flowers popping as they open –
If you but stop – and listen.
A bird’s sweet song,
A vixen’s cry and cattle lowing,
Clicks and creaks
Of bushes growing,
And all a part of something more
If we but stop – and listen.
Beneath it all the silence,
Deep, divine, eternal.
Ever present, breath by breath,
Life beneath the living.
Can you hear it sigh?
How to understand that noise?
The sounds, the sighs,
Created by life as it grows,
Is what makes for silence –
That great silence,
If we but stop and listen.
But…
Prime Ministers and Presidents,
Do they hear it,
The deep silence of it all?
Are they ever filled with that breath,
That breeze from the other side of the sky?
Do they stop and listen,
Or is their silence the loneliness
Of men who have alienated their world?
The busy violence of leadership
Put there to mask the silence,
The quiet breath of life
They do not want us to hear.
Do they know what they do?
And when it is time for them to go,
To fall and die,
To leave the one true office they have held,
The office of being human;
Will they then see, finally,
Their ‘office’ was an offence
Against the earth
That wants only to live
As Nature lives?
And when their fingers can no longer cling
Nor their hearts beat,
What will they feel as the silence
Breathes them out across the universe?
Will they stop and listen then?
And will the universe, maybe –
If they accept it –
Maybe, offer forgiveness?
Or will it simply do as it has always done,
Breathe in, breathe out,
Clothing its silence with a bird’s song?