Kit Kelen #870 - first draft notes for my father's language

870

first draft notes

for my father's language

he shelved it

kept a small red box

Mother of God was in there

is with me now

and then words come back

first shoots a sun brights

even though winter

and we can't know what tree

are all asides he threw

land lost

tribe gone under

how many generations ago?

those ones wished themselves away

and others wished still harder

are wishing to this day

I have the books

no embassy would want them

to me each word's a magic spell

megalapodos

alabacaflika

he gave back a sword from the war

to the war

some jungle took its trophy

I kept the bottle though

my father's language ran through his whole frame

with vengeance, like a will to live

he gave that all away

he was in deep for all the fled

the dead look after each other

dad said Jesus said

makes me custodian of something gone

those words were a journey

all the monument there can be to the lost

the known unknown

a sort of soil

we nothing ever grew

my father's words his mother's once

I never met them there

nonsense I suppose, to begin

they broke out in a fever

ornate and intricate of heart

his eyes are in it and his laugh

and gone somewhere

all of these long since

a chimney sent such words to the sky

will we be well received then?

my father's tongue was trouble

ages in the spite of time

ghost wordless in the dream

advice always in a language spoken

and often see the ache in him

here I am far from his war

from his flight

and look about

sunshone, green with thinking only ever up

with wings and singing come to light

what if he'd died for it, I'd never been?

and what if, for dad, it had been this?

and you know it is too

it's like this with mine one day

someone will guess at the page

draw a blank

to wonder what creature they are

or may be