Can you
Listen quietly
To the heart beat of
A caring,
Gentle melody
Coming from someone
Can you hear that?
Because
I know
Who can
But
He only have one friend
Not peace and calmness
Only silence
He doesn’t listen to anyone
Only silence
No one understand him
Only silence
Hours, days, years until death
He lives with silence

One day he met someone
A woman
He was loved.
He was forced to hear
Her lovely rhythm
And sweet sound
He listen silently

To feel
Those echoes
Vibrating on his bone
And the compassion and
Genuine intention
She shows to him

A sound of love
Produce sweet loud noises
Orchestrated
Music to his ears
He dance to it
More than you do
The sound of a woman’s love

Read me your words
I am yet to hear them
Knowledge to be absorbed...

Yet of the unknowns,
There's a fear within.

the singer should have warned us about his out of tune song
it was so undeserving of our live ears
the melody was unpleasant and the tune horrific
how could there be devotees to such bad talent
it just shows you that some ears are deaf...

Brian Hill - 2020 # 241

I see a boy underneath the bin
He prays desperately to a deaf god
Looming over I can smell his despair
Rocking back and forth in holy existence
Your prayer won’t save you now little duckling
Say I to the rat
But on he chants, on and on to gods and clouds and demons
He names them all, one by one endlessly chanting his desperate canon
Where are your gods now?
Do they serve you a merciful end?
I ask as I slash his throat.

A deaf republic can’t afford
to sit on its hands,

killing its sign language
in willful silence,

letting memory erase
the fear and the truth.

The disease existed.  
The shrouds too.

Concrete does not
pave over the blood.

A stroll in the park
does not tamp the pain.

The Punch and Judy show
is but the pantomime
for the forgetful.

The only sound heard
is the singing of
marionette strings

culled from a pile
of burnt violins.

When the air turns
khaki and violent,
the crowd disperses,

their hands in their pockets
signing and forming words.

In a silent closet at home,
the last parents teach
their children to sign.

The children sign
to the doors, windows,
the grass, the trees, the sky

anything with
the shapes of ears
before ears were banned.

My silent little dear
snoozes in his cradle
beyond the noises
I can no longer hear.

The quiet drip of
rain and sink,
the swoosh of
inside air circulating,
the vibrations of life
I can hear only with
mental captions on,
are the inaudible sway,
that separates you from me.

Can you hear my smile
with closed eyes,
will you love the
silence or the noise?

Will you delight in
birdsongs or  
in fluttering wings?

Will you laugh at
the music of the spheres
or delight in quiet
thoughts and contemplation?


Child of my April dreams
and September haunts
who breathes in the
whitewash walls of my soul,
what you choose to see or hear,
at first walk, I will protect  
under the signing of my hands.


*This is a poem about my looking back at my baby self, before I contracted Scarlet Fever and became  near deaf, wondering what I would choose if I had the option to hear or be deaf.