Silence concentrates

Silence concentrates

into a stone,

the circles close,

the trembling world,

wars, birds, houses,

cities, trains, forests,

the wave that repeats the sea’s questions,

the successive journey of dawn,

arrive at the stone, the sky’s nut,

prodigious witness.

The dusty stone in a path

knows Peter and his antecedents,

knows water from birth:

is the silent word of earth:

says nothing because it inherits

anterior silence, immobile sea,

vacant earth.

Before wind was there, the stone,

before man and dawn:

its very first of any motion

was the river’s first music.

Pablo Neruda