I once heard what I thought
LaShawnda Jones
was a calling. A mating call of yearning,
of need, of matched desire.
I listened.
Was someone seeking me?
The voice seemed familiar –
its vibration pierced my soul,
breached the dark midnight of my days
in the directionless wilderness of life.
It pulled me, spun me
surrounded and filled me.
The melody delighted me.
Surely it was a call to live;
to fulfill hopes and dreams
I kept listening.
Even as I called back,
I listened.
Even after I became a seeker
starving through the ravenous desire
of a supernova devouring its own light,
I listened.
I called back.
I listened.
I called back.
I waited and waited and waited,
for more than a dozen years,
I waited for my radiant reply to reach
the one my soul loved;
ached for the brilliance of their
presence to sustain me.
I thought I needed to see, to feel,
to be seen, heard, wanted, and needed.
I thought I needed someone to love me;
someone I could pour love into.
Yet aging with none of my needs met
altered my hearing, diminished my longing.
Silence is not only deafening,
it deadens the soul and mutes the heart.
I stopped listening to the void.
A lifetime ago, a whisper tickled my senses
through the wilderness of the universe.
But how could that be when
sound can’t travel in space?
Relics of my imagination had launched
on gases of hope, creating orbits of dreams
in the echo chamber of my heart.
So… I’m no longer listening.
I will feel what I can, be who I am, exist as created
with no regard for the sliver of sound heard
in the wilderness of loneliness, that had only
ever been my own echo reverberating off stardust.
