On Silence

by Kelly Norah Drukker

Is silence a kind 

of keeping

as the dead elm 

is reaching,

branches 

unnaturally smooth

If leaves are words

do they unfurl

until the beetle digs

and the mind

displaced from safety

faces inward

All living things

have their winters

and some never wake

But here amidst 

veery’s call,

spiraling, falling 

I catch the seeds 

of utterances 

golden as the sun-striped 

fronds of ferns

To call for calling’s sake, 

because it is evening, 

because the wind 

unwinds the ferns—

Because the skull

is safety’s nest,

so speech and song  

might flow as easily 

as breath

Kelly Norah Drukker is the author of Small Fires (McGill-Queen’s University Press), a collection of poems that won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Concordia University First Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Petits feux, the French-language translation of Small Fires by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné, was published by Le lézard amoureux in 2018. Kelly is a recent graduate of Concordia University’s PhD Humanities program, and she lives and writes in Montreal.

Image credit: Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944) The Swan No.16 (1915)