WORDS

You can say anything you want, alright, but it’s the words that sing, they soar and descend……

I bow to them…I love them, I cling to them, I run them down…I love words so much…The unexpected ones…The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop…Vowels I love…They glitter like coloured stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew…

I run after certain words…they are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem…I catch them in mid-flight as they buss past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives….. And then, I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a ship wreck, gifts from the waves…….Everything exists in the word….An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her.

They have shadow, transparency, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they have gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long….

They are very ancient and very new…..They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower………….

Pablo Neruda, from his autobiography:

I Confess that I Have Lived

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…A word that exists for its own sake alone is as dead as a man who exists for his own sake alone. But living words usually demand greater attention:

They are on the move, and we have to fall into step with them before we fall into conversation…

…There is always something new under the sun, because a mystery never ages. Our difficulty is to be alive to the newness, to see through the windows that are so steamed over with our daily breath, to be able to be old and new at one and the same time…

From a Broadcast by Christopher Fry (1950)