A vow of silence for a lifetime or a day is observance, renunciation. Add ill intent and it becomes subservience, humiliation.
In July 2021 Timothy Snyder wrote https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/magazine/memory-laws.html in the New York Times magazine. Last night, CBC played https://www.thisamericanlife.org/758/talking-while-black . In between I’ve been working on a talmudic study of silence, of how we silence, to be presented as an altered book. The poem itself is out for consideration, so can’t be published here in final form. But I include an excerpt and a work-in-progress image. The snowy day is suitably silent.
