Poetry By James Lilliefors

      Sunghwan Yoon CC




Meeting the Silence   

The silence asks, 
What are you doing with yourself?
What is it that you really want?

And you say, 
Just a little more time.
I know how to use it now.
 
For important things, 
things that hid for years
in plain sight, 
pretending to be something else.

Okay, says the silence,
but how exactly will you find 
these things?
And how will you know 
they’re really what you think 
they are?

You know the answers
to these questions,
but not all of the words.
So you say nothing.

And the silence asks a better question:
What if you already have what you want? 
What would you do, then?

And again, you say nothing.
Knowing: The important thing 
is not to answer the silence, 
but to create a silence of your own.
And to let this silence 
become your answer.
Everything else depends on that:
on how you meet the silence.




​
Without Warning 

Toss a cliché at God and call it prayer.
Or find a way to listen,
and learn a separate prayer.

The world does not want 
you to become too wise,
it isn’t good for business.
But it’s okay to live well, 
like a tree planted 
by streams of water 
that yields its fruit in season.

And to be silly at times –
to giggle like the Dalai Lama 
or to laugh like Thomas Merton,
who lived a good life,
on his own terms,
until he was electrocuted 
one morning in Thailand.

What are we to make of that?

Life does not offer easy answers.
But with prayer we might begin
to understand 
what to do with 
joy and despair 
when they arrive, 
as they will, 
without warning.





Inside

What people see at first
is not the person
who lives inside.

But a set of clothes, 
a walk, a hairstyle,
a glance.
A hesitation.

Don’t worry about that.
Go inward, 
and find something good,
that belongs to the person
who lives there,
and bring it out.

Let them see that.
Surprise them.

​

​
James Lilliefors is a poet, journalist, and novelist. He has published in Ploughshares, Snake Nation Review, Intangible, Wind, The Washington Post and elsewhere and was a writing fellow at the University of Virginia.