Dead Languages

I heard a man speak hard, shrivelled words
from out the left side of his mouth.
They had been pounded flat
by the pages of heavy books,
and fell to the floor with a lifeless thump;
a droning, laundry-list poetry
punctuated with random, sterile ironies.

Then I heard a woman speak words
straight from the heart of her womb.
They tumbled out of her,
brazen and lusting for life,
like a litter of yelping, squalling animals.
Her words were nourishing
like mother's milk; rich and exhilerating
like chocolate ice cream
on the hottest day of summer.

And as I basked in the delicious
tingling, puppy-lick warmth
of her language,
the man stepped in front of me
with his sun-blotting shadow,
and implored me with the power
of his high-school-style peer-pressure
to follow the intellectual line
laid down by his lineage
of venerated sages in pasteboard caps.

I told him I preferred the voices
of those whose need to speak and be heard
was a life or death proposition,
of those who need to berate, acuse, curse, shriek,
bitterly weep, shamelessly expose, seduce
and sing hallelujah with their words
just to be seen and acknowledged.

Brothers and sisters,
I have been to the mountain top
and I have seen a vision of a time
when the forests and beaches
will be our classrooms,
and our textbooks the sand and soil.

The fruit of the tree of knowledge
will be ripe for plucking
and one sweet swallow
will connect you directly
to the heavenly database.

We'll learn the secret knowledge of all things
from the movements of the stars,
the chattering of squirrels,
the decay of a leaf,
the faces in the clouds,
the meanderings of insects,
and the density of bones and rocks.

Poems will burn like the sun through a lens;
will cut through stone like the wildest river.
Our words will be divine messengers once again,
and every poem will be a pregnant seed
containing an entirely new world.

David Aronson
January 2006