One Hundred Words About Silence

I have a difficult relationship with silence.

I think we all do.

At the moment I am writing a sequence of poems on silence. It begins with a simple Sunday morning before everyone wakes up. But ends – probably seven poems later – connecting silence with death and finally our society’s war against silence.

In the front line are the ipod and mp3 players. I watch the ipod generation in the classroom, not just blocking out the voices of their friends, or my teaching voice, but their own inner fragile voices that speak of what they need and who they truly are.