“Silence to Silence” Poem

A couple of months ago I was talking with a few friends about writing ideas, and I thought “Silence to Silence” would make an interesting title for a book or a poem.  There’s a lot you could do with that kind of title.  At the time, I thought it’d be a good title to describe someone mourning the loss of someone they love, enduring the silence of that person, living day by day without hearing their voice.  Or perhaps it could describe a couple who didn’t talk about things that needed to be talked about .  My friends of thought of less-depressing topics like starting out with the silence of the morning and then the silence of the evening. 

Anyway, thankfully I don’t have any experience with the depressing situations I had originally envisioned.  And I didn’t want to exercise my imagination to put myself in that world.  So I didn’t feel I could give those topics justice .  But while doing my scripture study this week, I thought of something that I could write about.  I was studying the apostasy and thought of someone enduring the silence of the heavens.

So this is what I came up with.  It’s no work of art – we were only supposed to spend two hours on it.

Silence to Silence by Leticia Watson

The heavens are closed
– silenced
Prophets buried in the earth
Covenants lost and forgotten
Scriptures altered and reversed.

False prophets all around me,
Leading the sheep astray
Relishing the silence,
Itching ears turn away.

Oh, God, where is thy voice?
Where are thy precious truths?
How shall I endure the silence?
What would thou have me do?

Deep within I hear an answer,
To my quiet prayer:
One will knock and I will open
Then the silence will be broken.

After I finished the poem, I realized that I did have experience enduring another kind of silence … waiting for a baby.  I thought a haiku summed it up perfectly.

Silence to Silence #2 by Leticia Watson

No baby crying

No baby crying last year

And so I endure.

At first Ben thought it was funny and whimsical.  Then he realized how sad it was.  I was going for both.

Humming Birds and Other Thoughts from Time Out for Women

Last weekend I attended part of Time Out for Women, a seminar sponsored by Deseret Books, in Seattle, Washington.  Though I have plenty of problems with the conference, I did walk away with a few good ideas that have been helping me throughout this week.  Some of these were given as parts of quotes, but I wasn’t able to write down the source.

-Return to places where good resolutions are begotten.

-No good thought is ever wasted.  (Boyd K. Packer)

-Imagine fruits and vegetables.  What kind of person would you be if you ate those every day for a year?  Now imagine a candy bar.  What kind of person would you be if you ate that every day for a year?   We can look at the entertainment we watch in the same way.  Imagine what kind of person you’d be if you chose to put in General Conference instead of Kono 97-whatever.  The entertainment we choose to watch will determine who we are.  Avoid the wasteland. 

-Whatever you’re asked to do, and accept to do, do it with all of your heart.

-After you pray, get up and go.  Expect your prayers to be answered.

-Pray for a forgiving heart.

-There are refugees all around us, refugees of emotional trauma.

-About comparing ourselves to others, we can liken ourselves to the humming bird.  Humming birds are funny because even when there’s two bird feeders, they hardly ever go to the empty bird feeder.  They usually go to the feeder where another bird is feeding and get upset when all of the sugar water has been taken.  They just don’t realize that there’s another feeder, and that someone always always replenishing the sugar water.  There’s no need to compare.

-Ever feel upset when you’re on the road and there’s a traffic jam or there are people in line ahead of you?  I like the key phrase one of the speakers said to himself:  “You’re not in that big of a hurry.”