In the soundless depths before dawn
you are with me.
You are not only in the lightening of the sky
but also in the embracing dark of this room.
I wait for you
with you
and the morning
like the night
is faithful.
^What I wrote this morning,
and then
what I read:
“To preserve the silence within – amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness, where the rain falls and the grain ripens – no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.”
And also this:
“Is your disgust at your emptiness to be the only life with which you fill it?”
^Both quotations from Markings by Dag Hammarskjold
Julia: Thanks for your poem and these quotations from Dag Hammarskjold. I enjoy reading from Markings. What an amazing book and person. After Hammarskjold died John Kennedy said, “I realize now that in comparison to him, I am a small man. He was the greatest statesman of our century.”