We are vessels of time

A single word -

slide the tongue across lips, moisten

the twin sisters coated with the accumulated dust

of a day’s travel, pronounce ‘Tripoli.’

Feel vocal chords thrum over sounds

the mind makes in an absence of consciousness.

The plucked bass causes lips to vibrate,

the tingle, an anchor moving up through water,

bursting free as the sound moves down the ear canal

and into the open sea of memory.

The experience of associated consonants

and vowels trip the senses, conjures images

of a time displaced in the shifting sands -

the sounds of the word, the timelines

that tinkle, an Indian girl dances, head askew, hands

at the end of a series of angles, fingers clap symbols

in the synaptic paths

paved first in sandaled feet, dreamt of in caves,

before spears became bombs and fire, the flames

to sear the flesh off differences.

We all speak in tongues.

The single word, loaded with past periods, prods us

on a journey to a place

that exists in our minds, a contemplation

of a time displaced in particles called children

who experience the world

upon the humped-back voice of preceding epochs.

Words make sailors of us all; we travel

upon sound-waves back to moments

where histories rise up as pyramids, where

fading events, like the rusted, scattered, bloodstained

remains of battles, first entered language.

The starting point’s faint echo

conjures up visions of sand and animals

eyes of now have never seen. We feel the imprint of feet

upon a landscape lost through choices

or the avalanche of planetary forces.

Once uttered, words defy

a short trip between two points. Dictionaries

hold only a fraction, cannot define

wrinkles casting us back to places we have only seen

with the clarity of the mind’s eye. Language

moves outside the flimsy barriers of the here and now -

we are the flesh and bone singers of history.

Words are not a journal of the distance

lost, they are a ripple of the effect

the shifting landscape has had upon us.

The span stretches back to the unknown, the landscape

seen, is fragile as thought. If the light shone

is too harsh, if truth

is too brightly sought, the listeners

do not leave their lounge room, minds do not fall

into the tunnel of imagined connections.

Displacement is lost in facts, but a whispered moan,

a faint, modulated call, a certain pitch,

becomes a vessel upon the ocean - water

flashes faint on distant waves - draws

the ear, draws the mind, makes the body thrum,

brings images closer to the stroking oars -

flesh stretched tight over the hollow that is history;

a father’s sad, lost eyes, the sound

of time’s echo, a mother’s quiet voice

calling, ‘Come, come, come back to me now.’