There is madness in the number
Of the living.
You, still you, jostled in the cities
Among the communal people,
We Seven Billion scorching the earth,
Numbing our senses, senses evolved
To to tell us when to flee
In search of Clarity,
Clarity in the sense of Safety,
Clarity in the sense of Silence.
Me, still me, watching the fog
Crawl through the sheared fields.
When the crow stops calling
From the tallest oak,
When its echo dies,
I rise on expanding Quiet,
On the rare moment without engines,
Buoyed by the lack of human sound.
––Title, epigraph, and two lines by George Oppen
