Words For New Eyes
I want to peer through tomorrow’s eyes.
Not a thing already old,
not a yesterday word
only temporarily paroled
from a moribund dictionary.
These words
newly dead now for millenniums.
Words old enough to have echoed from Eve
as she howled
from her guttural heart to a mute moon.
The newborn always come in the night
always in-between the past and future.
I want to be the parent of that birth,
not a distant and feeble uncle already
replicating an old understanding,
not a gummer or mummer.
I want words born in a universal forge,
their fire burning bright still.
Not any part of an effete scribbling
far removed from an Ur meaning,
its archetypal images already diluted
in ages of misreading and misdirection.
The etymological root of everything
is just the one word for everything.
Instead I only have these words
seeking to be new while still wearing
old, borrowed clothes.
Sometimes I wake up
in the middle of the night speaking in tongues;
a language so luminous
that star travelers from the distant future
could converse with me
from any compass point of my mind.
I want new eyes to drill down
to the pictographic roots
of every linked letter and script.
Words then would be individual revelations,
direct arrows from a new bow,
each a poem in itself.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2021
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