Richard Granvold
Cipher of the Silent Bell
There is a window the frost cannot touch—
not because it is warm,
but because it remembers another season
entirely.
Beneath it, something waits. Not a question,
but the feeling one leaves behind.
The echo of having once needed an answer.
It lies there,
not asleep,
but listening.
A figure stands before a mirror that does not reflect
but forgives.
He has no name,
only a motion repeated gently—
three steps forward
into vanishing.
Time knocks—four notes.
Then silence, holding the place of a fifth
like a candle holds the dark
until lit.
The light is not from the flame
but from the memory of wanting to see.
It draws a path no one has walked,
yet the footprints bloom as you dream them.
A lock exists,
not to guard,
but to be touched by what cannot be held.
Three keys drift near it—
one shaped like sorrow,
one like breath,
one like the space between.
You look for the answer,
but it is already looking through you.
Not in the lines,
but in what waits beneath the language—
a silence that trembles with meaning,
as if a bell had rung
so long ago
you feel the sound
only now
in your bones.
And still it rings,
in the center of sleep,
where the code unfolds
like wings
you forgot you had.
The Weight of Light
The boy was born with a storm inside him,
a hurricane curling in the pit of his belly,
a quiet thing, a loud thing,
a thing his mother prayed over, his father drank against.
The streets outside his window hummed like broken violins,
and he learned early that a man must walk carefully, or not at all.
He watched the sun fall against the Harlem rooftops,
gold slipping like a promise, and he thought,
What is light if I cannot hold it?
What is freedom if it is always someplace else?
The boy grew. He became a man,
though no one ever told him what that meant—
only that it involved suffering, and silence,
and a certain way of wearing your shoulders,
as if to say, I am here, but I am not yours.
And so he left.
Paris, with its river that did not ask questions.
The cafés, where men leaned into their cigarettes as if waiting for salvation.
The books, stacked like small altars.
He sat with ghosts, with strangers,
with words that unspooled themselves like prayers.
But exile is a strange kind of mercy.
You wake up one morning
and realize that the absence of chains is not the presence of home.
He wrote. Because writing was the only language that did not betray him.
Because his mother’s voice still lived in his blood.
Because the world, despite itself, deserved witness.
He wrote.
And somewhere, in the space between memory and flight,
between Harlem and Paris,
between the darkness and the light—he found himself.
