Beneath Our Speech

by Mark S. Burrows

Mark S. Burrows is professor of theology and literature at the University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, Germany. His poems and translations have recently appeared in Poetry, 91st Meridian, The Cortland Review, The Anglican Theological Review, The Southern Quarterly, Eremos, Weavings, Metamorphoses, The Tablet, and Almost Island, among others. A forthcoming volume of his poems, The Chance of Home, will be published in 2017. mark.s.burrows@gmail.com

 “Silence contains everything within itself. It is not waiting for anything. . .”
—Max Picard

In the dining room of the abbey guesthouse, 
a sign on each table reads: Silence is spoken here,
and so at dinner we gesture wordlessly after salt
or signal with our hands for bread or water.

Hour by hour we settle into the comfort of this
unfamiliar discipline, an island in an endless 
sea of talk from which we came, a refuge in 
the word-sated world that is too much with us.
    
Day by day the stillness roots more deeply,
at first a hum in the mind and then with time
the place for a wider listening, the quiet call 
of breath that breathes beneath our speech.