Tag Archives: time

On Language

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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

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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

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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.

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