Untitled
I am fractious.
I smile
I frown
I drift in and out with the tide.
The water is hollowing out the useless parts.
Only the strongest lines will remain.
I am being worn away
Into a curiosity.
Tag Archives: time
On Language
Language. What a beautiful thing.
The English language with all of its silent letters
Complex ins and outs that drive people batty
Born of German, French aunt
The fingerprint of man’s migration and time
All can be read if one looks deep enough.
Root words.
Ah, root words.
I’ll tell you a secret:
There is a magical source of language.
It goes back to Latin
And then it goes further yet
Indo-European, and further
To the hazy histories of the beginning of humanity
Some say we sang before we spoke.
We sing to our children
We speak with our hands
But we are not the only ones
Who carry the magic of language.
Birds have complex conversations.
Animals are anything but mute
To the right kind of mind, they are as clear as words
Scents, postures
A flick of the tail
Attentive ears belie a casual mein
But I digress; forgive my babbling tongue.
Language changes
Some dream of uniting language
No. If we ever had one language
If our culture homogenized to that extent
We would lose precious perspective.
Some dream of preserving an ancient language.
This, too, is an effort in futility
Though a beautiful one.
Scholars will be scholars.
All it takes is for a group of people to live together for a while
And a new sublanguage is born
Every generation has its own phrases
Every locale its own accent.
Some fear the Internet
That it is changing our grammar
How could an emoticon be a word?
No one can spell anymore!
I love language unconditionally
Every new word or phrase is a delight
A paragon of brevity.
We are all human
Language is only a medium
A shortcut to another’s mind.
Maybe that is what makes it
So very beautiful.
To Rendezvous with Time
When I was a child
Time and I were friends.
We used to sit together
Enjoying the sunset through the trees
Spending evenings after dark watching fireflies
Just feeling the cool air nip at our fingertips.
But time and I had a falling out.
I stopped communing with her. I started making demands.
I told her what to do, what needed to be done. She was never enough for me.
She fled
As time is wont to do
I chased her too hard
But time cannot be tamed
She must be approached with respect.
When you calm down
She’ll come back and join you.
But only if you give her a place to sit.
The Bell Curve
The other day Don asked me, “Have you ever noticed this about language, everything comes in threes?” He was talking about jokes, fables, lists in speech (e.g. life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness).
I thought about it and said that maybe it’s a common speech device because we need three items to be able to recognize a pattern.
And then I thought about this concept again. I’m always seeing it lately. I wrote it right after I wrote the cycles poem because I didn’t feel like I’d adequately conveyed the concept, and they tie together. One bell curve is half of a circle… if you blur your eyes when you plot it out.
Anyway, because it’s always in my brain, here it is:
Writers are taught to see
The bell curve of a plot.
Rising action, climax, falling action.
Sex has a climax. It fits the bell curve perfectly.
The life of a mayfly.
Birth, hours of development, a climax of mating, death.
Every little segment of time
No matter how small
Has a climax.
Inhale, hold, exhale.
Cut it smaller.
Just inhale.
The breath climaxes near the end, when you can’t take in any more and must stop.
A hummingbird beats its wings.
Lift, hold, fall.
The hummingbird darts to the next flower.
He arrives, partakes, departs.
The hummingbird takes a meal.
He hungers, sips nectar, stops when he is full.
The hummingbird is caught by a predator.
Fear, struggle, acceptance.
We live in bell curves.
They all link together
To form the line of our lives:
A golden spiral.
One long corkscrew from the past to the future.
A double helix of plot curves
A never ending cycle
Of birth, death, birth, death.
Sarah D. Silvey 