Saturday 21 March 2009

When Silence becomes Torture


He'd been wounded by words

Not their utterance

But their absence


If the Word becoming flesh is salvation

Than their delayed embodiment is hell

And the father who refuses to incarnate love in language

Some kind of tormentor

Of the boy who wanted nothing more than his approval


Memories of silence torture adult-child

Long after father has grayed, lost ability to walk, stopped breathing

Death eternally forestalls those words from coming

Compounding pain upon pain


Corrie ten Boom’s words ring like that bell which must stop ringing

He listens to the deafening gong

Identifies his own paternal shortcomings

Discerns mercy that’s divinely been offered him

And in the quiet left by his father’s failed lips

He moves his own

In what at first feels more difficult than Atlas’s burden

Filling with the power of his own voice the silence

I forgive

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