Echo

The amount of quiet I'd need to write a poem feels unattainable, as if I'd have to somehow reach deep space and even then, the harrowing sounds of earth might echo in my ears. I would hear fathers wailing and sisters grieving, I would hear lovers making love for the first time or the last, I would hear a mother singing the softest lullaby. I'd hear explosions and code reds and so many sirens, I'd hear planes crashing against mountains and the sounds of whales mating, I'd hear a cricket's legs rubbing together, a shimmer of hummingbirds hovering inside the reddest flowers, the first cries and the last breaths, the pleas for justice, the chants, the songs from the fields and the mountains themselves telling all they've witnessed and never told. If I were in that emptiness, listening,   maybe then I'd realize that there was no need to travel so far from home. I could've stayed at my kitchen table, with the dog snoring, my daughter's voice on the phone in her room, a deep sigh escaping my own body, a mango silently ripening in a bowl. If I had just sat there long enough, a poem might have found me, slipped in under the door like a love note or a ransom note, demanding nothing in return.