By Charles M. Sumid
Copyright 2025

The silence here is not an absence but a presence thicker
than any sound could be—it settles heavy
on pine needles where the deer have pressed their bodies into snow
and left behind the shape of their listening.
The trees know how to hold it.

Between the birches something breathes that isn’t quite the winter,
isn’t quite the lake beneath its iron lid,
but something older that remembers when these hills were ocean
and still dreams in the language of the drowned.
Even the wind goes quiet.

I’ve learned to listen to the conversations snowflakes have
with gravity before they choose their branches.
Each one carries down a tiny piece of silence from the sky
to add it to the collection underfoot—
miles of hushed cathedral.

Meter 15/11/15/11/7