Mute

I have no words to form this suffering.
What syllables I say are mere platitudes
of what must be done or felt.

Every intonation merely underscores
my toneless utterances of sentences:
purely cheap copies of vibrant statements
by red-blooded beings.

Yet, there is no silence. The howling of the
storm, the crashing of the waves, the
cries of the people--- these are
precursors of the language I
continue to learn:

that of the suffering people.