On my passport my home’s official name.
Others are stamped in colors on its pages.
Even the future issued me a visa. It cost
less than it might have, more than it should.
I seldom recognize myself in photographs.
In the future I long dreamed of, silence
would be peace again, as it had been once,
long ago when it welcomed my voice,
back when the birds in their chattering
paused to hear what I might sing, and not
this other kind of silence, in my carry-on
in the overhead compartment, the bag
of that silence in which a man no longer
hears his own heart, doubt is so strong.
I am nowhere now, I thought, listening
to the engine’s roar, black out the window.
How would I ever come to you, find you
whom I had not met, with something to say,
with something to give? A man with a sign
stood among others with signs with a sign
that in another kind of silence called me.
In the future I’d arrived in, you were there,
urgent, the work of love and restoration
clear in your voices, in inflections of my
mother tongue so different I heard every
word as if it had been cleaned and polished,
and every word, along with every magical
translation, from Khmer, from Japanese,
from French, awakened a word in me.
And in this future, not a dream, silence
was no longer oblivion, no longer nowhere,
but peace as I had known it, long ago,
when it seemed to welcome my voice,
back when the birds in their chattering
would pause to hear what I might sing,
and then, all at once, answer with dawn.
—Richard Hoffman
Written for the second South-South Institute on Sexual Violence Against Men & Boys, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, May 25–29, 2015. The South-South Institute on Sexual Violence Against Men & Boys, brought together researchers, clinicians, survivors, community activists, and policymakers from 29 countries.
