Classic Poem

After all is said,
After all the clever talkers have talked,
After we see that nothing is said until something true is said,
After we learn that true things do not need to be said or to be endorsed,
After we acknowledge that only false things need to be said,
A curtaining truce of silence falls upon all languages over the face of the earth,
And men far and near who were kept apart from each other by speech look into each other's faces in the silences and understand.
Who can account for the mysterious emptiness of words?
The rivers of the earth flowed before words flowed,
The stars in space were hot and cold before words were hot and cold,
Poetry was poetry before words came to the poet,
Life held its fragments well together before the logician gave logic to words,
Love loved best before the words of the lover and will love best again after all the words of lovers have passed away.
The world is misled by the wordiness of words,
Words are stuffed and choked with their stale air,
And I can already brush dust off the newest words.
We keep on saying things that have all been said,
The silences always show words their heels
Words are for short trips, the silences are for long journeys,
The silences are home and tucked in bed before words have footsored their slow way to a finish
After all is said and words are bankrupt,
The silences take up the task with miracled touch.
Then the dead fields hasten their harvests.
And words themselves come along and ask the silences: What is your secret?
Why does everything respond to you and nothing come at our will?
Why do the children nestle up to you and run in terror from us?
Words worded a great mist, the silences came and cleared the weather.
I am sure that if I faced a god or a judge somewhere and was asked to account for myself I could not do it in words—
I would have to appeal to the sunrise and sunset and the carpenter's bench and the faces of the children to account for me.
For I have seen that the scriptures are not after all in a book,
They are in hearts and in the plainest people,
They are eloquent in the condemned and those who are thought little of,
They are radiant in the men with smirched hands who serve the abhorred utilities of the state.
For so they live, first and last, with unanswerable stern power,
Without word or gesture or protest or plea coming inevitably to their own,
After all is said.