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One Minute’s Silence

Stuart Butler

Friday, August 23rd, 2002

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 In this drum and bass world,
It’s hard to catch any silence,
Let alone hang on to it.
It’s rare to hear nothing
But the sound of your own heart-beat,
Or the song of a blackbird,
Or the rustle of the leaves in the wind –
Cars, trains and aeroplanes,
Radios, muzak, TV’s,
Cassetttes, CD’s, DVD’s,
The list is endless,
An endless list of diversions,
An endless list of cultural conditioning,
An endless list of subliminal conditioning,
To make you think that manufactured sound is normal,
And that silence is aberrant and wrong.
And, so it is, that most people,
For the reasons just explained,
Associate silence with the word “funereal”,
They associate silence with sadness,
With death, with remembrance, with war,
With reflection, with grief, with frustration,
With loss, with impotence and anger –
And we will feel all of these things this Saturday,
During the one minute’s silence at football matches
All over this wonderful country,
Whether we are there or whether we are listening to the radio,
And the whole nation will be linked together,
Linked in a common bond of sympathy,
And compassion, bewilderment and confusion;
And it is from that minute’s silence,
That minute when we all look both inwards and outwards,
In mute confusion,
That we can fuse together in a new stronger union,
Each of us a friend, supporter and comrade to another,
In a society where caring about winning and losing and partisanship
Is less important than fusion, empathy and mutuality,
In a society where silence has a positive and recurring place,
A place where we can, as individuals, think one with another;
For it’s that, after all is said and done, that makes us civilised.

© Stuart Butler

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/one-minutes-silence/