Sunday, 29 September 2013

Words Make Sailors Of Us All

Once uttered, words
define a short trip between two points.
Dictionaries hold only a fraction,
cannot define ripples that cast us back.

Language moves outside
the flimsy barriers of the here
and now - make us
the flesh and bone singers of history.

Words are not a journal 
of the distance covered, they are 
the wrinkles the shifting landscape
affected upon us.

Displacement is lost in facts,
but a whispered moan,
a faint, modulated call,
a precise pitch,
become vessels upon the ocean.
Meaning flashes faint on distant waves –
draws  the ear, draws the mind,
makes the body thrum,
brings images closer to the stroking oars.
The ship made of flesh
stretched tight over the hollow
that is history; a father’s sad, fading eyes,
a lost lover’s quiet voice calling,
‘Come back, come back, come back to me now.’

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