Alison D. Moncrief Bromage

ABOUT SILENCE

The child lay down, turned away from me
as if to say, Death be loud! And I missed it.

That sound waves never break but dissipate
as floating rings, gives me comfort.

If I’ve told one bay of water, I’ve told them all
that where the soul turned and died is not itself the grave

but that the place where his knee first bent
is like the yowling of a whale; some far off message is left

warbling in the leagues of sea.         About silence, Daedalus says,
let it build the space of itself. See how it multiplies.

And measure not it, but what it has moved.

ALISON D. MONCRIEF BROMAGE has published poems in The Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, and elsewhere. Her collection Daughter, Daedalus won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from Truman State University Press. She is a writing tutor at Yale University and lives by the shore in Stony Creek, CT with her husband and two children.