Letter from the Other Side of Silence — Stephanie L. Harper
Dear One: A life-long dusk of onyx-black
has failed to send back even faint echoes
of my own refrains. I know what it is
to be mocked by the wind’s bare-rhythmed hiss
through night-hidden palm fronds and rolling surf,
stultifying me with its droning lie
that this something-other-than-living is
all there is… But now that our Unsaying
has sprouted to the surface, basked in light,
and given over its once-crucial husk
to the fallow soil’s reconstitution,
what is left for it but to inhabit
its belly and sing from its deep?
Pronouncing with its crystal vibrato,
Yours is to live!—warbling wildly
between the future’s bracing topographies
and the past’s veiled griefs—my mind registers
magic such as would teach the sea-floor’s stones
to rise up and stitch closed the most ancient
of gulfs. With its made-up plane of coordinates,
this distance separating us has no bearing
on our shared heart’s magnetic north;
so, it’s no wonder that I hear your voice
as clearly and close to the core of Truth
as my own, for we are of the same string-stuff:
the elements with which I’ve already composed
more terms of affection for you than I dreamed
I’d ever know! Youare The Speaking, itself;
and I—no longer a wraith—am body and breath
that will live the rest of my days learning
to say your name…
Stephanie L. Harper is a proudly neurodivergent poet who grew up in Northern California; earned a BA in English and German from Grinnell College in Iowa and an MA in German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; raised two extraordinary humans to adulthood in Oregon; and completed an MFA from Butler University in Indianapolis. She now lives in Indiana with the world’s most adorable husband and cat. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Vox Populi, The Night Heron Barks, The Dodge, Laurel Review, Crab Creek Review, Resurrection Magazine, Taos Journal of Poetry, Salamander Magazine, and elsewhere.
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