Empty Rooms

In the hush before the exhale,

the apparent emptiness of lungs

actually saturated with air and life,

whispers sneak out of the silence,

converge, and await their birth as words.

Other vacant spaces shush in expectation:

starved stomachs, aborted bellies’ absences,

empty rooms, derelict ships, deserted tombs,

old battlefields with blood dissolved to dirt,

prisons that could not contain apostles

aided by angels typically invisible,

and the Good Friday tabernacle—

not inhabited, not abandoned,

but a haunted, hallowed box.

And these words cannot confine you;

you refuse to conform to their content

or disfigure yourself to fit their form.

Still, they transfigure in the stillness

of their seemingly hollow syllables,

conveying the echo of the voice

that called forth Creation in the void.