ALT Song by T. S. Eliot displayed as follows: When we came home across the hill No leaves were fallen from the trees; The gentle fingers of the breeze Had torn no quivering cobweb down. The hedgerow bloomed with flowers still, No withered petals lay beneath; But the wild roses in your wreath Were faded, and the leaves were brown.

ALT Mr. Grumpledump’s Song by Shel Silverstein displayed as follows: Everything’s wrong, Days are too long, Sunshine’s too hot, Wind is too strong. Clouds are too fluffy, Grass is too green, Ground is too dusty, Sheets are too clean. Stars are too twinkly, Moon is too high, Water’s too drippy, Sand is too dry. Rocks are too heavy, Feathers too light, Kids are too noisy, Shoes are too tight. Folks are too happy, Singin’ their songs. Why can’t they see it? Everything’s wrong!

ALT Only a Word by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper is displayed as follows: Till our world, so sad and weary, Finds the balmy rest of peace— Peace to silence all her discords— Peace till war and crime shall cease. Peace to fall like gentle showers, Or on parchéd flowers dew, Till our hearts proclaim with gladness: Lo, He maketh all things new.

ALT Silence Comes from Somewhere Else by Nikola Madzirov translated from the Macedonian by the author When at evening I hear the voice of my dead mother, I summon deer to my side— they who understand all the languages of fear without saying a word. I would invite them into the courtyard of quiet changes and ask them about the sins of the unborn, about the distance between the blood of two enemies after the war. I would ask them to lock the silence— secret of the open eyes.

ALT The Plain Sense of Things by Wallace Stevens displayed as follows: After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires.

ALT "Sharks’ Teeth" by Kay Ryan displayed as follows: Everything contains some silence. Noise gets its zest from the small shark’s-tooth- shaped fragments of rest angled in it. An hour of city holds maybe a minute of these remnants of a time when silence reigned, compact and dangerous as a shark. Sometimes a bit of a tail or fin can still be sensed in parks.