Still I Remain
My years move slowly through my hands
Like beads worn thin with prayer,
Each one a quiet testimony
To how long I have been listening.
The world has always been too loud for me,
Its edges too sudden, its demands too bright,
Yet still I rose each morning
And learned again the discipline of speech.
I was never swift with human rhythms,
Never fluent in the crowded tongue,
My heart kept different time than clocks,
My courage learned another song.
I carried silence like a second spine,
And feeling like a fragile flame,
Guarding both from careless winds
That never learned my name.
Age has thinned the outer armor now,
The practiced gestures, the borrowed face,
And what remains is simply this:
A watchful soul, a slower pace.
I no longer chase the common road
Or beg the gates of noise to part;
I follow only what is quiet
And recognizes my heart.
My faith was never thunderous,
Never armed with shouting proof;
It grew the way the moss grows strong—
By patience, shade, and truth.
I believed because the dark still held
A place where I could breathe,
Because the stars did not demand
That I perform belief.
If I endure, it is not by force,
Nor by the strength the world admires;
I endure the way the candle does,
By tending small, persistent fires.
I endure by keeping what is soft
In a century of grinding stone,
By trusting that the listening God
Knows the language I have known.
So let the quick lives pass me by
With their bright success and clamor—
I have kept a quieter covenant
With sorrow, hope, and grammar.
And when at last I loosen this tired form
And step from speech into the whole,
I think the silence will receive me
As something it has always called its own.
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