Poem: No longer listening

I once heard what I thought  
was a calling. A mating call of yearning, 
of need, of matched desire. 
I listened. 
 
Was someone seeking me? 
The voice seemed familiar –  
its vibration pierced my soul, 
breached the dark midnight of my days  
in the directionless wilderness of life. 
It pulled me, spun me 
surrounded and filled me. 
The melody delighted me. 
Surely it was a call to live;  
to fulfill hopes and dreams 
I kept listening. 
 
Even as I called back,  
I listened.  
Even after I became a seeker  
starving through the ravenous desire 
of a supernova devouring its own light, 
I listened. 
I called back. 
I listened. 
I called back. 
I waited and waited and waited, 
for more than a dozen years,  
I waited for my radiant reply to reach  
the one my soul loved;  
ached for the brilliance of their  
presence to sustain me. 
 
I thought I needed to see, to feel, 
to be seen, heard, wanted, and needed.  
I thought I needed someone to love me;  
someone I could pour love into. 
Yet aging with none of my needs met 
altered my hearing, diminished my longing. 
Silence is not only deafening, 
it deadens the soul and mutes the heart. 
I stopped listening to the void. 
 
A lifetime ago, a whisper tickled my senses  
through the wilderness of the universe. 
But how could that be when  
sound can’t travel in space? 
Relics of my imagination had launched  
on gases of hope, creating orbits of dreams 
in the echo chamber of my heart. 
So… I’m no longer listening. 
 
I will feel what I can, be who I am, exist as created 
with no regard for the sliver of sound heard 
in the wilderness of loneliness, that had only  
ever been my own echo reverberating off stardust. 

LaShawnda Jones