My name is Podrig Otuma and I've loved the radio ever since I was a child.

And there was one moment of radio listening to the BBC years ago that has always struck me.

It's famous in BBC history.

Roman Williams, the Welshman, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, was speaking about silence.

And while he was speaking about silence, he kept a six-second silence on the radio.

And, you know, it's amazing to think six seconds is nothing, but it lasted forever on the radio.

And you're thinking, something happened, has the signal died out?

Is my radio dead?

And then he continued talking. It was so confrontational and so simple and so brave.

The poem today is a poem that also makes use of silence.

This is a poem by the Palestinian-American poet Fadi Juda,

and the title is a pictogram, three dots in square brackets.

How do you say that? I don't know. Do you take a breath in? Do you just hold silence?

Is it some kind of expectant erasure or emptiness? I don't know. So here it is.

By Fadi Judah.

I can't explain it.

Something about pattern turning into rhythm.

All my life I knew liberty would be mine after great disaster is visited upon me.

Though some attain it after visiting disasters on others, it isn't

liberty they attain. What is disaster? And what liberty? Years later, I came across a book about a boy

whose fears lived in everything he lived. Without reading the book, I had read it. I was not that boy. I was the fear

he wanted to be real, a right part for a wrong life. The helping hand his fantasy desired.

...