Progeny of Voice

142 ADAM SCHEFFLER PROGENY OF VOICE Before dawn, the stream is whispering like a needle pulling along a thread. The children wake, the dreams stay. And so the child-hike begins from their cabin following hare-trails to fields of wheat: listening. Rowing their bodies forward, ankles shushing the wheat, praying for safe passage. Everything can be seen as passing. All existence a fuse igniting just here along an infinite path. No choice, no branching, all given into the shadows. And what if what is given is a child’s dream never again forgotten, or a vision, half awake in a field, how he is intuiting a bristling phalanx of tall thin soldiers? The dawn breaks into birdsong. Aphids hop their green dots, haphazard, ants run like buttons in and out of holes, mending, unmending. The mind relaxes, busy with listening: children at dawn, something spinning from their lips, no sound comes. ...