Notes About The Poem
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Failed Translator
The wind attempts to interpret the world~
its grammar fractured mid-gust,
its syntax strewn across the plains
like torn pages from a prayer
still learning how to speak.
It carries voices
but never the meanings.
A whisper becomes a warning,
a sigh becomes a secret,
a promise becomes nothing
but a shift in temperature.
The wind moves through yucca spines
as if reading braille
it cannot quite decipher.
It stumbles over the ridges,
mispronounces the shadows,
confuses longing
with the simple act of passing by.
Sometimes it brings me fragments~
half a sentence from a distant ridge,
the ghost of a name
I once tried to forget,
the echo of a question
no one meant to ask.
I hold these mistranslations
like artifacts,
wondering what the original message
might have been
before the wind
broke it open.
But perhaps failure
is the wind’s only fluency.
Perhaps it mistranslates
because accuracy
would be too heavy to carry,
too sharp to deliver,
too honest to survive
the journey across the desert’s
wide and listening silence.
So I let the wind speak
in its flawed dialect~
its stutters,
its erasures,
its shimmering approximations.
And in those errors,
I hear something truer
than any perfect translation:
the world trying,
again and again,
to reach me
in whatever language
it can.
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