Listen to the silence

• The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan with illustrations by Peter Sis, Scholastic Press, 2011. $17.99     

       An unrelenting silence surrounds many sickly children. It is the silence of rest and books, broken only by the muffled echoes of other children playing outside the windows. These are children who might me kept in the isolated yards, away from those who might carry germs and bring on infection or more serious illness. They face the silences of bedrest and enforced calm. Of separation.

            In some cases, these children discover the whisper of a breeze in the trees or the musical voice of a neighbor through a hole in a fence.  But it is the silence of a sickroom that can also turn a child to books and poetry and magical moments. That was the case with Chilean poet Pablo Neruda 1904-1973  who once, while getting some fresh air and playing alone in his yard, traded a toy sheep for a pinecone through a hole in his fence. At that moment, he discovered “all of humanity is somehow together.”

            Award winning writer Pam Munoz Ryan heard that story and her imagination was lit with the image of a little boy named Neftali whose father ridicules him for his weakness and whose neighbor children taunt him. The Dreamer, a story of a sickly boy who discovers the language of poetry and finds his connection to humanity, was the result. Illustrations by Peter Sis round out this tale helping readers visualize the largess of the poets imagination.

In this novel, Neftali is drawn out of the silence of his illness by the sounds of raindrops plopping on leaves and the clumping of footsteps as they move through a hall. He stops to listen to the “caw” of a bird and the slice of an ax through a branch. “What is sharper,” he writes in an early and tentative poem. “The hatchet that cuts down dreams? Or the scythe that clears a path for another?”

            Neftali’s poems connect him to Uncle Orlando who owns a newspaper and shares his love of words, teaching the boy that words are strong and can bring change to lives. Poetry can be the brushstroke of that change. While this imagined life of Neftali isn’t Neruda’s biography, it is an imaginary reflection of Neruda’s life. According to Munoz Ryan, the poet, one of the most read poets of this century, wrote “to the common persona about the common thing.”

            As Neftali, the character based upon Neruda, writes about the common thing, it takes on magical perspective in the quiet world of illness. Portraying a beetle under a rock, the boy writes, “What lies beneath the bravado of a black and shiny armor?”

Inspired by the uncle who has loses his newspaper offices and business in a fiery rebellion yet declares that an editor will hire him and he can rebuild, Neftali discovers the power of language to create unity and solidarity in a single detail. The uncle gives Neftali hope that his own voice, trapped inside a sickly and weakened body, also has power when he says, “Did you know that many whispers can make a very loud noise?”

            Sick room isolation is replaced by imaginative vision and the reader begins to see that an entire world can be metaphorically portrayed by the magnifying glass of small details and meaning can be found in the smallest of images. For Neftali, it is almost as if the illness that limits his life becomes his poet’s gift. It is certainly the gift Neftali gives all who hear his poetry.

           The reader learns along with Neftali that, sometimes, all it takes to connect to the world is one small moment, or one whisper joined by many others.