Poem: "Haunting Words"
This poem came out of the October 4, 2011 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from my_partner_doug, and sponsored by clare_dragonfly. Usually when I write about linguistics, the angle is more uplifting, but there's something sad and spooky about dead languages ... and the awareness that all languages are mortal.
Haunting Words
The linguist is haunted by dead languages,
murmuring in the voices of those long gone.
There are languages slain by plague, by war,
by plain old entropy, by causes unknown.
Only fragments remain, etched on artifacts
or echoing in younger, related languages --
syllables left behind like shards of glass
hidden in the sand, waiting for unwary fingers
to sift through in search of meaning.
To study the history of languages
is to study humanity and all of its horrors,
rambling over battlefields and through tombs
in hopes of making some sense out of the senseless,
forever followed by the voiceless spectres
of things for which we no longer have any names.
Even the books and the scrolls
give up their silent accusations from every page:
See what the hands of men have wrought.
The dead languages cry out for justice,
but there is no justice for genocide,
only memory.
The linguist trails dusty fingers
over the stone monuments
where someone has written the words in granite,
words like "No More Hiroshima" and "Never Again."
The linguist knows that someday
English and Japanese and Hebrew and German
will all be dead languages, their phantom phrases
haunting some distant descendant
with ruins like the ankles of Ozymandius.