Sunday Morning Poetry
Languages
There are no handles upon a language
Whereby men take hold of it
And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
It is a river, this language,
Once in a thousand years
Breaking a new course
Changing its way to the ocean.
It is mountain effluvia
Moving to valleys
And from nation to nation
Crossing borders and mixing.
Languages die like rivers.
Words wrapped round your tongue today
And broken to shape of thought
Between your lips and teeth speaking
Now and today
Shall be faded hieroglyphics
Then thousand years from now.
Sing-and singing- remember
Your song dies and changes
And it not here to-morrow
Any more than the wind
Blowing ten thousand years ago.
13 comments:
Beautiful thanks for all you share
Oh, I love me some Sandburg. Happy Sunday to you!
perfect. perfect, perfect image for this poem. fabulous!
xoxo
love that poem! what happened to your music?
The photo does fit the words. Oh I like the images. "Your song dies and changes" Isn't that how life goes? Letting it be caught in the wind and returning in another form. Thanks for your Sunday poetry, it always make me think.
Love.
Cxx
I think -- oh, so often -- about how language is not really "fixed" at all, but changing, changing all the time.
This morning, at breakfast, my daughter had that thought: "How did we think before we learned how to talk?"
Just thinking of you right now because I've placed a big Amazon order and How to Get Your Child to Love Reading is on it!
Such an interesting thought. Our words will blow away and new words, perhaps unintelligible in any respect to us, will spring up in their place, like seeds sown perennially.
LOVE the image with these lines today, Relyn! And much to ponder from this verse of Sandburg's. While we all like to note things for posterity, for the next generation... hubby & I have no children to pass things on to. I write for myself, and have grown all right with the though that all I say, write, do, creative will be gone when I am. It's not that matters more and more, I find. You always dig up the best for these Sundays! Happy new week, my friend ((HUGS))
What a beautiful tribute to language ... and the photo goes perfectly!
SO love your love for words
and sharing it
with a happy sigh:)
-Jennifer
Hi Relyn!
Another beautiful pick. I heard a line today about our single lives being 'a parenthesis in eternity'. (And it's the title of a book.) This poem reminds me of that. Love the line, "Languages die like rivers". Hope you're well, love.
xoxo~ Kirsten
Ohhh, when I saw this image and then read this piece of writing by Carl Sandburg, I thought of the film, The English Patient. Have you ever seen it, Relyn. It's so beautiful!!!
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