Green Linden Press

Dear Emptiness

The scientists say, point blank, I’m made of you.
Mostly of you. In even the coldest stone, they say,
most in the coldest stone.

If your not being means we are,
leave, please, a trace of yourself    here

between these lines—I cannot hope to convey you
with words, the clatter of is, its tether
and snap, no; my hope: to delay you

with space, spaces and words. I’ve listened
for years—is into was—and the isle is full

of noises. Of never and will. And the last light
de-dum, de-dum, will find again
the green moss. But what I hear, alone

on the shore, is voices, human voices,
becoming, from nothing, the island’s song.

It’s magic, dear Emptiness, I know,
but it’s so: Our space not yours, but ours,
its rhythms, are made of you.

How it works I’ll never know
but that we are is what I praise.

Murray Silverstein has been published in RATTLE, The Brooklyn Review, Spillway, Poetry East, West Marin Review, RUNES, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, ZYZZYVA, California Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, Pembroke Magazine, Elysian Fields Quarterly, among others. He has authored two books of poetry, Master of Leaves (2014) and Any Old Wolf (2007), the latter of which received the Independent Publisher’s Bronze Medal for Poetry in 2006. Silverstein is the senior editor of the anthology America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), winner of the Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal for Anthologies in 2017. All were published by Sixteen Rivers Press. A retired architect, Silverstein also co-authored four books about architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press). He holds a master’s degree in architecture.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2021