When I wait for words to come
and they refuse,
I know that silence is golden
and spreads its early morning sunlight
across the breakfast table
where yellow butter melts on hot toast.

Light from the rose window in Chartres
once spread its spectrum over my hands
and I bathed in its speckled glow.

My fingers stretched out before me
and I was speechless;
for in such glory,
mortal things like words cease to flow.

So much can never be said
even if it is sensed: fresh coffee,
poutine à pain, bread baking,
flowers  bursting into bloom,

the sense of immanent beauty that fills me
each time my beloved enters the room.

33 thoughts on “Silence

  1. Hot, strong coffee and fresh bread. What a delight for the senses! And then to have the company of the one you love? Even better! The poutine I know is French fried potatoes covered in cheese curds and gravy. I guess there is more than one variation.

    Liked by 1 person

    • When I was in the hospice, the overnight staff would often bake their specialities while we were sleeping and serve them up for breakfast. Poutine a pain is the French for bread pudding, or bread and butter pudding. It is delicious, smelling of cinnamon, spices, raisins etc. Nothing to do with the Russian President!


    • We do our best, dear Jane, you with your wonderful drawings and paintings, me with my colorful cartoons and my photos. We also try to capture, in words, what we see with our eyes and feel with our fingers and sense through our noses: so difficult. But we try. Sometimes, once in a while, we succeed. Here’s to that success!

      Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s