OF HEARING AND LISTENING
Don’t just hear the words,
Listen and understand them:
Be in awareness:-
“It’s bad not knowing what’s said;”
“Not caring to know is worse.”
Silence
waiting, listening
gathering, noticing, wondering
memory, image, metaphor, language
shaping, weaving, illuminating
luminous, enduring
Poem
I used to think poems began with words.
Now I believe they begin much earlier~
in the pause before speech,
in the moment a leaf loosens from a branch,
in river light sliding across water,
in the faint fragrance of lavender
remembered long after the bloom.
The world is always speaking.
Not loudly.
Not in proclamations.
But in small invitations scattered along the day~
a shadow lingering where afternoon once stood,
a bird turning homeward,
an old photograph waiting inside a drawer.
The spirit notices.
It leans toward what others pass by.
It lingers.
It listens.
And sometimes through grace I cannot explain~
something unseen gathers itself into language.
A line arrives.
Then another.
Not as possession,
but as gift.
Not made from me,
but moving through me,
as though God had hidden
a spark of wonder inside the ordinary
and trusted me to find it.
So I follow.
One image.
One silence.
One small astonishment at a time.
And what begins as listening
becomes a poem.
There’s a strange bird in the tree
warbling weird birdsong at me.
I’m listening lazily.
~ Thinking that there will be a long time
of contemplating death ~
The sun shines down on me
and I’m smiling uncontrollably.
What a wonderful day to be.
laughing ripples
turn into traveling whispers
as they rush down stream
high noise level from planet Earth
dawn rises like an old god waking, casting silver breath across the fields
soft spirits wander through the meadow, stirring wind in tall, listening grass
a white-horned stag lifts his gaze—myth lingers where the earth keeps its hush
Since the dawning of my memory
it seems that I've been lost at sea,
and, from the moment I was born,
I've been listening for a horn.
Does anyone even know I am lost,
on these waves, turned and tossed?
Could there be a kind of knife,
to pierce this thing called life,
to cut through fog and ocean mist,
to find me and tell me why I exist?
Living always in fear or fright,
can I be saved by a house of light?
Buzzing brilliance, I leisurely recline.
And hold the dense receivers to my ear
Listening for a sign from feeble shine,
The whispers from a dusty atmosphere.
The hiss of static fills the ether-space
A crash of numbing waves upon the shore
Of numbers lost in white noise's warm embrace,
Drowning into silence forevermore.
Until that steadily increasing thrum,
Beating quiet against the void of space,
Its tender percussion a rising drum,
And grants an ace, a lonely speck or trace.
Years of white noise may blind the sky-blue sea,
But now the cosmos calls, at last, to me.
I see your lips moving.
Can't hear what a word you're saying.
Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah.
Wordku: 5-7-5 words
AP: Honorable Mention 2026
Who would have guessed — when I tilted my heart
toward baby lizard, perched on a colored desert stone,
she’d blink one eye at me, turn to smile, it seemed,
and lend a listening ear?
I’d only said in a lizard way:
I love you.
And who would have thought — that when stone had heard me
loving her, it would, it seem, speak back?
Loving stone, I was!
Stone, I so admire your villages.
I smile to your many stone peoples.
I eavesdrop on universal questions posed
around sacred fires carefully tended.
And around one hearth, among
cinder specks scattered– that one minute wisp,
grain of cinder there.
Dare I say I love you too?
I do! I do!
In that cinder grain I hear —
worlds of stars, sweetly singing!
By way of explanation, reader friend,
such is what a practice of
loving all beings equally
has made of me.
Crazed being?
Could be.
But could you nonetheless
accept the possibility
and likewise go love adventuring?
If you’d prefer, we could earnestly
and objectivity talk it all through.
Or say ~ Love come!
Speak through us.
Teach us how to listen.
Let this illustration be
that failure
contoured me.
The band’s composed of middle-schoolers
From within the state.
Most have never met before,
Yet right from out the gate,
Their music sounds incredible,
Professional and full
And any passerby would feel
Its strong inviting pull.
Of course, I try to listen for
One close-to-me trombone,
But in a band the point is that
No sound exists alone.
We’ll attend the concert later
Yet I’m glad we happened by,
Catching part of the rehearsal;
Kvelling* privileges apply.
*bubbling over with immense joy (Yiddish)
You never listened that was the problem
A Thursday afternoon—rain tapping its fingers
against the glass, impatient, like the aching in my ribs,
the one I could not name.
Write down four small wins for thirty days, the DJ said.
No fireworks, no epiphanies—just the whisper
of something lighter than a promise.
Day One: I watched the steam rising from my coffee,
the way it curled like a question mark. A win for patience.
Day Seven: I noticed the barista remembered my order.
A victory, small as a sugar cube, but it dissolved sweet on my tongue.
Day Fifteen: Rain again, but this time I opened the window,
let the damp air press its forehead to mine.
A win—feeling the weather, not just enduring it.
Day Thirty: The unnamed ache hadn’t vanished,
but now it shared the room with other things~
a handful of glinting, ordinary moments
I’d gathered like scattered coins,
enough to buy back a little of the light.
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