Language
Camille T. Dungy (b. 1972)
Silence is one part of speech, the war cry
of wind down a mountain pass another.
A stranger’s voice echoing through lonely
valleys, a lover’s voice rising so close
it’s your own tongue: these are keys to cipher,
the way the high hawk’s key unlocks the throat
of the sky and the coyote’s yip knows
it shut, the way that aspens’ bells conform
to the breeze while the rapid’s drum defines
resistance. Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon
with another. Rock, wind her hand, water
her brush, spells and then scatters her demands.
Some notes tear and pebble our paths. Some notes
gather: the bank we map our lives around
(2006)
***
Lamentations 3:28-33 (NIV)
Let him sit alone in silence,
for the Lord has laid it on him.
Let him bury his face in the dust—
there may yet be hope.
Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him,
and let him be filled with disgrace.
For no one is cast off
by the Lord forever.
Though he brings grief, he will show compassion,
so great is his unfailing love.
For he does not willingly bring affliction
or grief to anyone.
***
***
‘Language’, is by Camille T. Dungy, an African American poet and professor of English at Colorado State University. She has done marvellous work in her seminal anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), which sought to provide alternative ways of perceiving and engaging with nature through the lenses of African American poets and writers. In doing so, part of her project was to broaden the bounds of her readership’s understanding of nature, shifted away from the sometimes cloying romanticism so often featured in the Anglo-American canon of poetry.
Her poem ‘Language’ is one of the poems featured in her anthology. Her first clause is evocative: ‘Silence is one part of speech’, ascribing the absence of sound a significance in how we may understand articulation and soundscapes. She draws our attention then to that which we may think of as ambient noise – ‘the war cry / of wind down a mountain pass’, a ‘stranger’s voice echoing through lonely / valleys’, ‘the high hawk’s key’, and ‘the coyote’s yip’. These bursts of noise are hermeneutic – ‘keys to cipher’ – understanding that our silence enlivens the possibilities of listening to that which cascades naturally across an area of land. The sonic rhythms of that which is inanimate, the ‘Sage’ and ‘the breeze’, the ‘rapid’ and the ‘pinyon’, take on an animacy because of their capacity to produce sounds. They are anthropomorphised artistically as the ‘Rock’ becomes a painter, the ‘wind her hand, water / her brush’. The poem ends anaphorically, ‘Some notes gather: the bank we map our lives around’.
There is perhaps something to be said about how silence gathers the possibility of remembering how God is revealed in His creation, as is the subject of Psalm 66: ‘All the earth bows down to you; they sing praise to you, they sing the praises of your name’. Yet, for Dungy, ambience yields a different kind of reorientation, an auditory cartography in which every created thing has its own rhythm, pace, and place. Just as these sounds threaten to tear down, they also help to restore order.
In this respect, this notion of silence reminded me of Lamentations. In chapter 3, the writer implores of the mourner, ‘Let him sit alone in silence, for the LORD has laid it on him. Let him bury his face in the dust– there may yet be hope.’ Silence brings the ability to reorient ourselves, to be faced with the recognition of a kind of terror that our inner lives are patterned with sin, and to listen to how our yearning for the presence of God becomes amplified. Out of silence breathes hope, for ‘no one is cast off / by the Lord forever’. In a similar fashion, silence brings Dungy’s speaker back to the possibilities of order, a reminder of the coordinates by which a life can be structured, a recollection not only of a place in a broader scheme of things but also of what it is to learn to speak once again.
What is the place of silence in your life? Where do you often find yourself silent, and in the cradle of God’s hand, where does that silence bring you to?
***
© 2006 Camille T. Dungy