There are holes in the lost ecology of language.
Words, falling from grace, out of lack of usage,
acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, otter—
words wandering far from home, looking for loose lips
of poets, perhaps long in tooth but not short on ideas.
they came to the rally all jumbled up and in a mess.
It was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces
no endgame photo in sight, or a Rubik’s cube bereft of color—
as if to taunt the most OCD of us to complete the poem,
so we ratcheted color into shape, hoping for form.
Sometimes I want to take a hammer to language
or to pry syntax apart with a flathead screwdriver,
and beat it up until the cube shatters, internal structure lost,
leaving larger puzzles to decipher in the aeolian winds,
but the lyres are silent, once destroyed, won’t resurrect.
Only a pale shaving of sawdust and grit riding the wind.
And as we grow grey with age and larger in vocabulary,
old words continue to haunt us, wanting a mouthpiece,
but the audience shrinks to nothing until we are left alone
in a cavernous barn with archaic words roosting in the rafters
looking for flight to escape the throat of darkness.
Prewrite dead end:
They say, when living within another culture,
the hardest words to translate are the idioms,
the puns, the jokes. So much depends upon context.
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