Silent Symphony

The World of the Deaf

The world vibrates beneath my feet,
stories rising through bone and blood.
I feel thunder before the hearing see lightning,
catch rhythms they’ll never know:
the bass pulse of subway trains,
heartbeats through fingertips pressed to throats,
the way wind reshapes air into visible song.

My grandmother taught me to listen
with my skin, taught me how
every surface holds music:
wooden floors that catch drumbeats,
windows that trap train whispers,
walls that hold echoes like memory.
This is the language of bodies speaking to bodies.

In the deaf club, hands paint symphonies
in the air, fingers conducting light
into sentences. We dance to vibrations
that shake the floorboards,
our bodies finding rhythms
in the spaces between sound.
Each gesture is a note in this visual song.

The hearing think we live in silence,
but silence is just another frequency
they haven’t learned to tune to.
Look: the trees are signing in the wind,
birds write percussion on telephone wires,
cats purr morse code into our laps.
The world never stops singing — 
you just have to know how to listen.

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