Echo

Here, nothing can be heard, I know.
Statues peer up thoughtfully past spires
redundant and perforating the silence;
the prayerful hands of churchgoers
puncture silence too, then slouch into double fists.
Hopes and pleas this large, it seems, collapse
upon themselves. It's inevitable.
Even in that fraudulent quiet
pinning me down into the moments
awaiting sleep, I'll look
up and within (the smallest canyon
that ever was) and send in those prayers
from a heart that fears for itself and everyone
as only the heart of God can. That's when I
toil with my own ego, wonder my way
back through the hoodwink of conscience:
the fault of that first vain and luckless soul who
must have waited for the still clarity of water,
seen his face reflected against sky, and known it
to be his own, yet not his; or heard
his voice speak, really speak to him
for the first time with the troublesome
smallness of a thing so weighty as to seem
other and godly. Nowadays, like Echo,
I'm resigned to the burden of being unheard:
leave telephone messages to be reviewed
like handbills, then discarded; or invent
the daunted voice of a friend
reading aloud my letter as I'm writing it;
no different from all those times as a child
when I'd pull the empty tin and string
more tightly to comprehend the answer,
enunciate loudly enough for anyone to hear,
"I can't understand you. Say it again."
We all discover early on, one's
own words are clearer, more deeply
felt and discerned. That's why, drained of heart
and self and speech, somehow my instinct
knows well enough to fold my hands
against my ear at night, let slumber
be what it is, a chance
to listen to my prayers,
a chance to answer what's
larger than my self,
but smaller than God. 

© Karl J. Sherlock