Talking Walls

When we were children,
we walked through old houses.
We plucked golden petals
of life from the eaves.
The rafters were filled up
with shadows and memories,
with voices and featherlike
traces of dreams.

And we thought to ourselves
as we walked through great piles
of lavender dust and the fragrance of sighs
breathed long ago, "What a pity
these walls cannot tell us
of all that has passed here,
the things they have seen."

We thought they were silent.
We thought they were speechless.
Just boxes of fragments of seasons gone by.
We thought they could never
give voice to the secrets
embraced by their walls
and thus doomed there to die.

Yet still there was something,
a current that filled them,
a tangible music of life that had been,
a faint magic chorus of laughter and stories
and loving and sorrow and all kinds of cries
and all the sensations we feel under heaven
from hope to the pain when you can't touch the sky.

by Sara, copyright 1999, all rights reserved