Broken Words

We speak broken words,
with tongues that betray,
with syllables bruised
by their own inadequacy.

And still, we speak,
out of loneliness,
out of defiance,
out of the faint belief
that the world might return to us
something truer, more whole
than what we gave it.

Meaning is not the utterance.
Meaning is the widening around it.

Listen closely:
after all the voices,
after all the fragments,
after all the attempts
to say the unsayable,
it is the silence that remains
it is the silence 
that finally writes your name.