Intervals

The pause between heartbeats, that breath of sky before thunder— there lives a whole country we rush past, never mapping.

In the quiet before dawn, before birds remember their names, something ancient turns over in sleep and we almost catch it, almost understand.

We fill silence with sound, margins with ink, forgetting the spaces hold the shape of everything we say.

But listen: in the white between words, in the gap where the light bends, there is a language older than our need to speak.

We are not the noise we make. We are the listening.