Poetry is my way of celebrating as I live it, life. Below is a poem in tribute to English language (or any human language really).
Two houses
There are two houses of this tongue I speak,
The upper house chock full of deals and ideals,
The lower one is not, but contrary and riven.
We love to think our speech a remedy
Consulting first the conditioning of one
And then the reconditioning of the other.
The higher order would have its verse
In chapters of iambic pentameter and
The lower rabel would have it course.
Folly it is to hold though that words
To no chapter in no system of worth
Will ever be so constrained or chained.
But admit as well the presence in our midst
Of broken speech and the newly born jibe,
Those who sing out phrases heard but not.
Let's remember this our language
Has no nobility if it be not live
And lift us off our arses one and all.
Note. "Arses" is not misspelled, but slang expression.
ReplyDeleteNote. "Jibe" which is also spelled "gybe" some of us may recognize as a sailing term, but it has also come to mean a growl or "sneer." I can picture time on a sailboat where tacking meant dodging the boom until the gybe caught the boom on the opposite side of the boat. Language has this wonderful capacity to do the same thing as it negotiates forward toward apt expression.
ReplyDelete