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[ 2 poems from A Sharper Silence ]
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The Angels
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As day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel
the people we’d loved and lost calling
like a breeze that suggests itself but never
actually awakens the trees. She told me
again about the moment she decided to let
our first child go so she could go on
living herself, and I remembered
how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself
for a day, until I was lost and came
to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning
to comfort our baby after we’d scattered
her ashes, and I remembered that the sun
had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me
with something as different from thought or song
as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey,
our lost child. And then I told her again
that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed.
Even when I stood up and gestured, there
in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away.
I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go,
so I lay down under stars so sharp
in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even
when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds
stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels,
she said and then laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.
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Michael Hettich
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Gratitude
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Night emerges from the morning woods
+++++ to move across the tall grass toward us, sighing
+++++ +++++ faintly in the fresh light, as though it were confused.
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+++++ We call to it gently, like we might call a stray dog,
+++++ +++++ or someone’s lost pet, holding ourselves
+++++ ready to pull back if it threatens to hurt us.
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But this darkness is neither starving nor dangerous,
+++++ so we let it come close enough to pet, until
somehow it enters our bodies, like language
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+++++ enters a child, to make that child real
+++++ +++++ to itself. It’s a language we’ve spent most of our lives
+++++ learning to speak, though we’re still not able
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to say what we mean exactly: I love you
+++++ in words that capture the rivers and streams,
+++++ +++++ the huge flocks of birds, the silences,
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+++++ +++++ +++++ +++++ and the stunning losses that resonate still
+++++ at the core of our deepest contentment, all
+++++ +++++ the nights we’ve hugged in sleep, dreaming
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+++++ worlds we’ll forget as we wake, again
into a blessedly ordinary day,
+++++ one of many hundreds, hardly noticed as it passes.
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Michael Hettich
from A Sharper Silence, Terrapin Books, West Caldwell NJ; © 2025
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Michael Hettich does not shrink from allowing darkness to enter his body as freely as breath, or as dreams. Within the silence there is music, singing. The smell of sweat is perfume. We have no words yet somehow we share language. Fall we all must, through and into nothing, only to discover that the darkness is filled with light. That is what I discover here, alone yet not alone with the exquisite sorrow – the most ordinary day, hardly noticed as it passes, is blessed.
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Michael Hettich’s The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems 1990-2022 won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. He has published more than a dozen books through the years and received many honors, including several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. Michael holds a Ph.D. in literature, taught for many years at Miami Dade College, and now lives in Black Mountain, NC.
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Additional poetry by Michael Hettich at Verse and Image:
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. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
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– Bill
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Amazing poetry! The use of light and darkness interwoven within ourselves and within the purity of nature are hauntingly beautiful.