There Are No Words – a poem by James Lilliefors

There Are No Words

To really know happy, you must 
also know hurt. To know love, loss. 
But this – to know this moment, 
you need only to stand still, perfectly
still, and feel the soft sunlit movement 
of air over your shoulders, the slow 
suction of sea-pebbles underfoot, tidewater 
sluicing back to where it came from, 
eons ago. You need only to look out 
at the wind-scalloped waves 
to see what’s there and what isn’t.
In this moment, you are just flesh again, 
remembering the first flowering 
of sea and land, the third day. 
A fish breaks the surface, leaping 
through air, then falls back to what it knows, 
the churn of life, known trying to explain 
unknown. Fisher of moments, you need 
only to hold this one now, like a breath, 
or a pose, for a moment – that’s all we get. 
A moment in which the world appears
to say hello, but a moment that explains 
everything else – as seed explains flower; 
flower, seed; as sea explains land. Hold it, 
take it with you, as you fall back to the familiar 
churn, and remember, don’t forget 
to let the world astonish you,
wordlessly, every now and then.

James Lilliefors is a poet and novelist, whose writing has appeared in Door Is A Jar, Ploughshares, The Washington Post, The Belfast Review, The Miami Herald, and elsewhere. His first poetry collection, Sudden Shadows, was published in October.