Quiet: My Favorite Sport

Turn Up the Quiet

A dense forest,

a long road,

the hush of a pew.

Between each swell

even the ocean churns

out a rush of silence.

At home the refrigerator

hums in a steel envelope

of calm. When an ice cube drops

an after-silence descends that we

would not hear but for the fall.

This blanket, on this couch,

wraps a quiet that does not

bend as much as billows

and pillows and tucks

into my every sharp

angle.

I am a quiet

person in a quiet

life and still I crave

silence the way a

drunk craves the cocktail

that will change every promise and past.

In silence, thoughts gather,

divide, settle in quiet corners

to wait patient as Sunday

for a maybe

for a yes.

—  Drew Myron

Drew Myron is a poet, writer and head of a marketing communications company with a focus on hunger, homelessness, literacy, and health.

She is the author of Thin Skin, a collection of photos and poems, and her poetry appears in a variety of print and online journals. She is founder of Push Pull Books, a publishing company, and serves as director of poetry for the Denver County Fair.

Raised in Colorado, she now lives in Oregon. She writes a blog, Off the Page, and hosts writers and artists at 3 Good Books.

A note from Drew about the poem:

Much of my life is quiet, or the craving of quiet. Though I bike and hike and swim and ski, my real sport is reading. My favorite word: quietude.

Maybe writing a poem is the planting of stillness, a harvest of quiet.

— from Poem of the Week, a literary email produced by Vicki Hellmer. To receive a poem-by-email each week, contact Vicki Hellmer at: vhellmer@ottenjohnson.com