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The Poets Awoke
The poets awoke
The poets awoke one morning
The poets awoke one morning to find
The poets awoke one morning to find that all their words had left them
Fleeing into the blackness of night that had no end
The poets awoke one morning and found
As their mothers had warned when they were children
That there were some words too heavy for their tongues
For their tongues to lift
To carry the burden of speech
The poets awoke one morning and found
Like birds fleeing a burning field
Their words had simply up and flown away
No words to talk about what should not be
The poets awoke one morning and found their words smashed to smithereens
Like so many bodies under two-thousand-pound bombs
The poets scrambled, scrabbled
here, there, everywhere
Under rubble, trying to find a word, a letter, a phrase
The poets awoke to find that words that appeared so inconsequential
“the” “and” “but” “this””that”
Even those had been destroyed
The poets awoke one morning to find that along with that
More portentous words like “truth” had disappeared
The poets awoke
One morning
The poets awoke to find that even lies had gone
Scurrying away
So much vermin under bright lights
The poets awoke one morning to find that there was nothing
Nothing to say
And how could they be poets with nothing to say?
The poets awoke one morning thinking of words
Like “carnage” and “war” and “brutality” and “history”
Like “punishment” and “retribution“
The poets awoke one morning to find those important words dead
Of no consequence
Lying in the gutter
How could they, the poets who awoke that morning, those mornings
Do what poets do?
(And what do poets do?)
The poets awoke that morning
To nothing
To no words
To the absence even of the question
“What do poets do?”
To find that even silence, their silence, had fled
(In the absence of knowing what to say there is always silence)
The poets awoke one morning only to cries
Their own, their brothers’, their sisters’, their mothers’
their fathers’, their friends’
On awaking one morning
That morning
In the absence of words
In the absence of silence
The silence that is always
Absence
The poets turn to each other
Then turn to face the world
To ask
Who are we without our words?
Without our silences
How do we witness?
On the morning that the poets awoke
to find that all their words had fled
In consternation
In shock
In horror
That morning
When they awoke to find that all their words had fled
Had fled them
like sweat pouring out of their pores
They, the poets who awoke that morning
Were drowned in the absence of words
Their own words
In the absence of silence and
The silence of absence
Perhaps that morning the poets awoke
Along with those who are bereft
Perhaps that morning
The poet cried
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Born in Tobago, former lawyer and Poet Without Ambition (PWA), m. nourbeSe philip is an unembedded poet and writer living in the space-time of Toronto. She has authored essays, plays, short fiction, novels. Best known for her genre-breaking, book-length epic, Zong!, she has witnessed too many wars, but continues to love sunsets, libraries, the Caribbean, and cool, green Toronto ravines. In 2024 she was awarded the Windham Campbell prize for Poetry.
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Mira Schendel (1919-1988), Graphic Object, 1967