Silence

(This image does not appear on a smalĺ/phone screen)

I like silence and I like to choose when is the right time for me to seek it. I like to remember and reflect and, for me, that is a personal and solitary thing. Ever since it became a national stricture, twenty or so years ago, I have resented the enforced Remembrance Silence at 11am on 11 November and have done my best to avoid it.

This morning I was talking with a foreign-born volunteer at the very busy refugee organisation where I now spend quite a bit of time. There is always a swirl of noise there and often a feeling of things only just being under control. Just before 11 another foreign-born volunteer (different country, different faith) curved past saying urgently, ‘Isn’t it time for silence? Time for silence.’ And most of the organisation became still. Not completely – I could hear a couple of low voices from downstairs – but for a short while there was calm. And for the first time in my life, in the midst of troubled people who have lived through war, watched loved ones killed by hatred and intolerance, and managed to fall into that tiny minority who have succeeded in fleeing violence, the 11:11:11 quiet touched me.

Into my mind drifted a poem I learnt by heart a few years ago but which is now a palimpsest:

Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, –
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved - still warm - too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen. Futility. Oh yes...