Songbird — The deafening rumble of whispered questions
It's incessant, the chatter.
I fall asleep veered by waves and raised by winds, and mid storm I dream of thoughts meeting thoughts; bygone woes I believed buried deep in sand by a milky stream.
Meek, feeble arrows cast from fire pierce the clouds, finding glass, snaking through cloth;
some nimbly alight on my cheek as they fold their white wings to rest.
The simplest of blessings. Yet an unwelcome one.
Hesitation gives way to impatience as the elements quieten; but the taste of salt, iron, and wet wood in one's spit would make any man god-fearing.
I watch my boots torpidly fumble to the deck as all my other senses expect them to fail me. Treasures brought by the tempest scattered and shattered on the pine planks, tossed by insatiable claws craving a better loot.
Piece by piece I store it all, showing as much rapacity as I do pique.
One day I'll throw them at the lobsters, I say sometimes.
One day I'll work them into a crown, I say others.
But today they sit untouched, as I have a ship to mend and fish to net.
It's incessant, the silence.
I let my jaw drop, trusting that my tongue will follow the cue. And it does.
The most tortuous system of pipes, and valves, and tissues, and strings rumbles tightly, squeezing and pushing a humid miracle to the back of my throat!
Though here it fades, stillborn, through my teeth, for once again I forgot that thoughts are air while words are stone.
But then what is flesh? what is blood? what is bone? I ask aloud as I catch the sun pencil the weightless shadow of a weightless man on the sail.
A seabird shrieks, maybe in answer to my question; or maybe posing more.
Ours are questions lost at sea; some are fished, more are sunk, the rest are swallowed, but they all somehow find their answer.
Chatter and silence are songbirds that know no dusk nor dawn, incessantly blending their cries in the perfect counterpoint of a jarring harmony.
Deafening crew and captain of this vessel.
Check out the original and more at Writ In Dust
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