Enter Silence

You are not on the list of the world’s most spoken languages. But yours is the language almost everyone speaks: those who flung themselves off the rooftops, women in psychiatric asylums, entire populations snatched from their continents and deposited on far-sailing ships, teenage girls in correctional institutions, and dazed passengers on a bus leaving Iraq al-Manshiyya, bound for the unknown. You are the only way we can converse with the hills, for instance, or with the passing clouds. Without you, theater would be dreadful. And there would be no point in standing still before paintings, waiting for them to either part their doors or enter us through our wounds. Without you, we never would have learned it was possible to converse with ourselves. You linger in photos of our friends; your presence exposes them for the strangers they are. You are the only remnant of the protest, affixed to the scene for eternity, hiding in the trees. If we were to listen closely to history, you are what we would hear. And we would find you in the hearts of swarming cities, across faces buried in their phones—and in their hesitant glances at unfamiliar eyes in waiting rooms. O silence, we have not built these graves: They are your tongues of stone. Peering through the aperture of oblivion, they hum the dates of birth, and death, like a favorite song.