The Last Word

I thought I posted this before, but the post has disappeared....like the dying languages!


The Last word

In Boro the verb to love flows wide upon the tongue;

Onguboy –to love from the heart

Onsay – to pretend to love

Onsra – to love for the last time

and like the thirty one words for seaweed in Irish

that whiten without dissent upon the foreshore, *

the tongue in Boro begins to stiffen

and so we lose that which holds memory as a landscape might

and a Korean child’s tongue is surgically lengthened

that he may, one day, say “right.”

Boro- a  language in North-Eastern India

*“Death of Irish” by Aidan Mathews: ‘The tide gone out for good,/Thirty-one words for seaweed/Whiten on the foreshore.’ (In Penguin Contemporary Irish Poets, ed. Derek Mahon, 1990.)