Deaf Poets Society

Each man has a quiet that revolves
around him as he beats his head against the earth.
But I am laughing hard and furious.
I pour a glass of pepper vodka and toast the gray wall.
I say we were never silent.
We read each other’s lips and said one word four times. And laughed four times in loving repetition.
We read each other’s lips to uncover the poverty of laughter.
Touch the asphalt with fingers to hear the cool earth of Vasenka
Deposit ears into the raindrops on a fisherman’s tobacco hair.
And whoever listens to me:
being there, and not being,
lost and found and lost again: Thank you for the feather on my tongue,
thank you for our argument that ends,
thank you for my deafness, Lord,
such fire from a match you never lit.  ~

Ilya Kaminsky

My ear amps whistle like they are singing
to Echo, goddess of noise,
the raveled knot of tongues,
of blaring birds, consonant crumbs
of dull doorbells, sounds swamped
in my misty hearing aid tubes.
Gaudí believed in holy sound
and built a cathedral to contain it,
pulling hearing men from their knees
as though atheism is a kind of deafness.
Who would turn down God?
Even though I have not heard
the golden decibels of angels,
I have been living in a noiseless palace
where the doorbell is pulsating light
and I am able to answer.
::
And no one knew what I was missing
until a doctor gave me a handful of Legos
and said to put a brick on the table
every time I heard a sound.
After the test I still held enough bricks
in my hand to build a house
and call it my sanctuary,
call it the reason I sat in saintly silence
during my grandfather’s sermons when he preached
the good news, I only heard
as Babylon’s babbling echoes.  ~

Raymond Antrobus