Rick Doyle

There was a time when Max was silent as a moon,
as a satellite in transit behind the lunar pebble,
as a man whose mouth is shoveled full of earth.

It wasn’t just that he couldn’t speak
in public — oh, no! He couldn’t whisper
sweet nothings, couldn’t utter a prayer,
couldn’t even tell a knock-knock joke.
And this had come on him all at once.
He was twenty-one years old, he’d just
graduated from college, where incidentally
he’d never lacked the confidence to speak,
asking questions in the lecture hall,
answering them, too, not shrinking even
from arguing with his instructors.
Sharing observations. My God,
in those days, dripping with faith
in his own, as it turns out, quite orthodox beliefs,
Max yearned to be a professor!
It wasn’t until after he’d earned his bachelor’s
that he found himself utterly bereft of the gift
of speech, no more capable of opening his mouth
and holding forth than Demosthenes
before the saving lozenge, than Isaiah before
the burning coal touched his prophetic lips.

But for Max there was no burning coal.
No one, least of all Max, knows what it was
that delivered him from what could have been,
for all practical purposes,
the life of a desert father,
making possible a law school career
wherein he withstood for three years, albeit without
distinction, the withering fire of the Socratic method.
The cure remains as mysterious
as the source of his affliction,
but look at him now: here’s Max, rising from where
he sits, at the table of the accused, standing and turning
toward the bench, opening his mouth to speak,
launching into another of his closing arguments:

Your Honor, with all due respect to my learned brother,
on this record the state has failed to meet its burden…

Rick Doyle, poet and playwright, practices law in Downeast Maine. His poetry has been published in numerous journals, including Kaleidotropeand The Cafe Review, and won a SpiritWord Honors Award from the Maine Poetries Collective. His one-act play, Regalia, was selected as a winner in the Maine Playwrights Contest and presented in readings at Acorn School of Performing Arts, Stonington Opera House, and elsewhere. He has recently completed Regina Snowdeal, a full-length play exploring the efforts of a survivor of domestic violence to reunite with her son after he has been removed from her home by the state.

This poem appeared in Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age — Summer 2025, published by The Chaos Section Poetry Project. We’ll be featuring each poem from the collection individually in the weeks ahead. You can read the full collection or download a free PDF of the chapbook here.