Today is a Muriel Rukeyser day.

Out of all her bigger poetry, the one small piece that sticks with me is this:

THEN

“When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems.
When I am dead, even then,
I am still listening to you.
I will still be making poems for you
Out of silence;
Silence will be falling into that silence,
It is building music.”

Simon and Garfunkel tinkered with the music of silence first when I was a small child,  and it swirled in me till, when I finally stumbled over Muriel’s ‘Then’, I was absorbed in the simplicity of quietness — where Music, again and again, begins.

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