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It should be recalled
most of human history
has been lived in silence.

How many millions
of mornings,
afternoons and days

were undisturbed by
the clang and claxon
of war.

Of wagon wheel and
automobile, on cobblestone
and asphalt.

The day proceeded,
heralded by a dozen kinds
of birdsong.

Perhaps a flush of wind
through old-growth
oak and pine.

After we had learned
to grow things, the whisper
of a rainstorm,

pattering the leaves
of some small plot
of cornstalk or of beans,

on the other side
of a neighbor’s mountain
from yours,

where nothing much
had happened for
one hundred years.

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~ douglas john imbrogno | Cabell County, West Virginia, june 2020