Silence

Silence is not the stillness of death.
It is a field no one has walked yet,
a wide meadow where the breath returns
to the body that had forgotten it.

At first exile felt like a wound.
A door closing behind me.

But slowly the air cleared.

No voices insisting,
no hands pulling the sleeve of thought.
Only the long patience of the day
opening space around me.

In that quiet
I began to hear something
I had mistaken for absence—

my own voice
waiting.

Grief loosened its grip
the way frozen ground softens
when spring works secretly beneath it.

Roots I did not know were living
stirred in the dark.

They rose carefully,
as if remembering
a distant sun.

I understood then
that solitude does not diminish us.

It gathers what has been scattered.

The fragments of the self
come slowly together
in the open palm of silence.

Light touches them.

And what seemed broken
begins to resemble a shape.

Exile, then, is not only loss.
It is the difficult workshop
where sorrow is changed
into strength.

The wanderer who believed himself homeless
discovers, almost by accident,

that a dwelling has been growing
within him all along.