Silent Spring

By GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL

I saw a barn owl staring out from a telephone wire
driving down the road with the sky looking
like the edges of the newspaper we crumpled 
into balls to light the woodstove 

in the house I learned hunger in
through the fields made heavy with sky
the damp clinging to my skin 
the way a washcloth stays cloaked to the rind

It’s January, and in my environmental health science class
this afternoon we talked about Rachel Carson and Silent Spring
And with the EDM pumping through my brand-new noise-canceling headphones
I can’t hear the sounds of the world outside my windows

And the ground looks the way I remember April 
when I didn’t have words to put to it

 

Gray Davidson Carroll is a writer, public health educator, and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate connoisseur. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks, and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Sage Publications, Frontiers in Medicine, and elsewhere.

[Purchase Issue 28 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Silent Spring

Related Posts

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Cloudy sunset over field.

Florida Poems

EDWARD SAMBRANO III
I will die in Portland on an overcast day, / The Willamette River mirroring clouds’ / Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting— / Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets. / They will leave for work barely in time / To catch their railcars. It will happen / On a day like today.