☀ Today's Poem: "Parable of the Sower" David Joez Villaverde

The history of language is the history of money.
I heard that in a movie where a gun goes off
to punctuate the silence. I think about that
sometimes. Not the words, the silence.
How it dilates and slows. Sharpening what
follows. Muzzle, barrel, trigger. The standoff
between index and firing pin. Equal parts funny

and heartbreaking, these dull litanies. I think about
that too, how I sculpt the emptiness with talk,
folding vowels into the mouth of certainty.
Rondure, ungulate, sard. Words so
elegant in their knowing. Their vacuity
like a long, gilded flower, broken at the stalk.
Strange how opposites dovetail, certitude with doubt,

falsity with truth. One always sheltering the other,
compensating. Etymology means the study of
truth the same way ciao elegizes a word
people died to forget. Trace an edge
long enough and out whispers the slurred
dusk. Coins rub smooth, and yet it wasn't love
he gave me. It was mercy. This lagniappe, another

chance at life. In Quechua, yapay means to add,
to augment. As in yapasaq, used in the book
of Matthew to denote the act of giving.
In that parable, the word winnows
across an indiscriminate earth, living
only in fertile silence. When I wanted, I took
what I wanted. Indiscriminately. I thought I had

nothing to offer. That addition was the act of taking
without apology. There was no movie. He leveled
his pistol at my face and smiled. It was a joke
that took years to open into a laugh, how
a wayward seed will languish under the choke
of thorns. Long before I learned to give, I reveled
in pain. Its drama. Each word a gesture of its making.

When he drew on me, nothing changed. I didn't clear
the cobwebs from my hands. I didn't learn
how to listen. Or how to forgive.
I only knew this silence
as an echo I didn't want to relive.
A stillness, a gift. This word I whet and turn,
lagniappe. Lagniappe. He who has ears, let him hear.