Sound and Space

A child deems sleep

with deep suspicion,

protests the obligatory

hour of bed,

resists slumbering

mind, listless senses

descent into the ocean

roar of dreams

only to wake and find

a world turned without

conscious thought

keeping sidereal time,

waltzing to a music

made in the heart of stars

darker now than night.

What sound

is the space

between notes,

a progression of time

ticking in hearts

that ends when

baton is stilled

or dreamers wake

to new suns

and old loves.

Perhaps there is another

chorus that humans

do not sense,

spectral as it is

just those spaces

between us

a breath of separation

parting the quick

and the departed,

spaces

that make you

not me, D natural

not A sharp. Fancy

if they were not

how all would be

one dreary dying

monotone.

What sound plays

between notes

in the score of all

our lives that children

perceive as only the small

beat of time deafening

their elders, just a rest

between the notes before

and those as yet

unplayed.