Silence
by Babette Deutsch

Silence with you is like the faint delicious
Smile of a child asleep, in dreams unguessed.
Only the hinted wonder of its dreaming,
The soft, slow-breathing miracle of rest.
Silence with you is like a kind departure
From iron clangors and the engulfing crowd
Into wide and greenly barren meadow,
Under the bloom of some blue-blossomed cloud
Or like one held upon the sands at evening
When the drawn tide rolls out, and the mixed light
Of sea and sky enshrouds the far, wind-bellowed
Sails that move darkly on the edge of night.
*
Silence originally appeared in Banners
(George H. Doran Company, 1919.)
Babette Deutch was born September 22, 1895,
in New York City. She is the author of ten collections
of poetry, four novels, six volumes of children’s
literature. She died November 13, 1982.