---
title: "Witness"
url: "https://ruthocallaghan.com/poems/witness"
updated: 2026-10-12
description: "\"Witness\", a poem by Ruth O'Callaghan from The Silence Unheard."
---

# Witness

We had heard the dove’s three notes and seen\
the curve of light against a naive sky, smelt

unguent from crushed palms beneath our feet\
and were caught between hosanna and crucifixion.

Knowing what was written we were afraid\
of what might be demanded, wary of that we might discover

beyond birth. So, yes, we did travel slowly, each decision\
an indecision, each suggestion once, twice, questioned

but at the first snow-melt we began our journey,\
followed rivers in full flood from the abundance that ice

had borne through winter’s keep, had, at the hint\
of a reluctant spring, chosen, if choice were possible,

release. Of course, dying framed the silence.\
There was the call of one reaching out for the comforting

cry of another, the hand held, a touch,\
though all were beyond the reach of language, beyond

those small hypocrisies of death. The first true birth.\
The knot cut close.

For what is the past but the scar of other centuries, a spike\
of time to beat against locked doors? And who will dare

to open to the stranger whose words are differently chosen,\
whose promise is exemption? Yet, unhope,

framing the silence, clings tight as a caul and krumholz*\
smothers abandoned gardens

where those who have sown thought falter. Perhaps,\
only the blind man, he who rocks at the edge of the known,

his world a long cane’s length, may pierce those dark tangles,\
may witness what is written.

But who would believe in the word of the unseeing?\
Or know in the unseen is the silence unheard?

Though when the bleed of shadow behind the sun\
darkened the sky

we held fast to the charred end of that day,\
knew the cry was the pith reluctant to release the flesh.

And still we failed, unprepared\
for linen unwound, the re-composition, sheltered by stone.

*krumholz – dark tangles of dwarf hemlock

_From The Silence Unheard (Shoestring Press, 2013)_