The Shape of New Words
Something new rises as the first rains enrich the soil:
Words, believed lost, well up
Past freshly shaped leaves;
Missing verse ascends through the flowering brush.
What was unfinished is ended; secrets
Curl from the sky’s cuff,
Forming a lyric
Sung by weed and stone.
Lost languages burst from a crisscross of roots;
Rising through the rain’s nib,
To be written on breeze and bark.
Voices that leap from a sea cliff’s clay
Enter our throats,
And we begin to track
The orbit of their sounds.
Forgotten pages appear in our hands.
We begin to whisper rhymes
Written by the dew; by salt spray
Billowing from bees’ wings; by a gleam
Reflected on a polished cup.
Our mouths can now shape the newest of words.
We need no longer pry them
From the fray of regretted lives; heal
Their scorched hands; shelter them
In the well of our mingled blood.
From the collection Crafting Wings (2017)
Originally appeared in Alliterati
