Flipping Tables

And somehow

I found a way

to forge

my own path

to march

to my own drum

I hum the chants

to my own tune

Opinions are louder

than gongs

sometimes

everyone speaking

toward the air

everyone certain

small altars

of being right

everyone carving

the world smaller

with their mouths

offering pieces

of each other

to invisible crowds

saying too much

too fast

and somewhere

in all of it

we stopped hearing

not for agreement

just for the quiet weight

of another life

I think

we are losing the plot

mistaking noise

for truth

volume

for conviction

when maybe

we could all do well

with a little more

reverence

a little more

stillness

a little more

silence

so love

has somewhere

to land

“The Monk by the Sea” by Caspar David Friedrich (1808–1810)

I started this poem thinking about how loud everything feels right now. How fast people speak, judge, respond, move on. It feels like everyone is always saying something, but not always hearing much.

I kept coming back to the way opinions stack on top of each other. How easy it is to mistake volume for truth, or certainty for care.

Some of the imagery came from ancient and holy spaces I have been in and around, having grown up at a pivotal age, my first real memories, in Izmir and traveling to Ephesus. Places that held a different kind of attention. Stone, air, distance, quiet that felt older than language.

The poem is not trying to explain those things directly. It is more like they stayed in the room while I was writing.

I also kept returning to the story of Jesus overturning the tables. Not as a central argument, but as an image that stayed with me while thinking about noise, exchange, and what happens when something meant for reverence gets filled with something else.

I did not want to name specific platforms or moments. It is more about pattern than place. The way we divide ourselves so quickly into positions, and how easily that starts to replace attention.

Lately I have been drawn back to quiet. Not absence, but presence. The kind of quiet that does not need to prove itself.

The poem moves toward that. Toward restraint, discernment, and the idea that not everything needs to be spoken immediately or spoken loudly.

In the end it is less about conclusion and more about longing. For a way of being with each other that leaves room for something softer than certainty...

Love,

if it has space to land.

"The School of Athens” by Raphael (1509–1511)