Tuesday Poem - The Silence by C.K. Stead

                                                                     Karl in Genoa
                                                           


The Silence

The dead we know are gone except

when dreams return them. So it was

Frank Sargeson took me aside

in Hell and said, ‘You know, my friend,

how well the wind among the reeds

is used by shaman and guru,

rabbi and priest.’ He had the face

of Dante’s much-loved preceptor

Brunetto Latini among

the sodomites, as we ambled

down the avenues of the damned;

and he, brushing ash from his sleeve

went on, ‘Those with a patch of earth

and running water lack vision,

preferring to leave such mysteries

‘to desert-and mountain-dwellers

and the poor of Varanasi.

Where little is lacking listen

‘always to the silence until

you hear it whisper its name.’ So

he faded into fire, and I,

half-waking, wrote to remember

all that he’d said—and listened for

the silence, and could not hear it.

This poem by New Zealand writer C.K. Stead was short listed for the recent Montreal Prize.

Below is a link to a site which lists most – if not all – of his writing achievements, there are too many of them for me to go into. I bumped into Karl at the Genoa Poetry Festival a few years back and every so often we get in touch. I very much liked his poem – Into Extra Time – which was in Best NZ Poems 2007 and emailed him to tell him so. And he emailed me a note of congratulation when my book This City won the Kathleen Grattan Award. He lives in NZ but he does get around a bit. One could bump into him almost anywhere. http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/steadck.html