Lost Vocabularies

/ Issue 15.2 /

Language death is rarely a sudden event, but a slow process of
each generation learning less and less of the language until its
use is relegated to the domain of traditional in poetry and song. …………….Wikipedia, “Language Death”

Would I
I wonder
Have been better off

Composing
In some different mother
Tongue

Say among
Tofa
Reindeer herders

Or with South Siberian
Tuvan nomads
Or perhaps

Wayampi grub-
Seekers in Guianan
Mists

Or those isolate
Karaim still holding on
To their nouns

In the Lithuanian village
Of Trakai or the
Ho-Munda

Chirping
Away in India’s
Orissa State

Perhaps
Ifugao rice farmers
Would reckon

Any answer
To be found
In a gnomon’s shadow

Or in the cries
Coming from a mosquito’s
Death throes

Of course as I
Follow
Such speculations

3,000 languages
Are going
Extinct

The elders
Having so few to teach
Time space species number

(The Bosavi word for
“Tomorrow”
Also means “yesterday.”)

Therefore I shall travel
Far indeed
Into the boreal rainforest

Until my hand
No longer counts
To five

While a whirling
Rhapsode
Within a ring of dancers

Chants
To the night sky
These my freighted idioms

Which some linguist
With admirable
Artistry

Seated by his lamp’s
Forged firelight
Will one day

Translate into
A startlingly original poem
The one beginning

Two paths
Diverged
In a yellow rain

Brian Culhane

Brian Culhane

Brian Culhane’s poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, Plume, Parhelion, and Blackbird. His first book, The King’s Question (Graywolf), won the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson Award; his second, Remembering Lethe, is forthcoming from Able Muse Books. Retired from teaching, he now divides his time between Seattle and New York.
Brian Culhane

Also by Brian Culhane (see all)

Author: Brian Culhane

Brian Culhane’s poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, Plume, Parhelion, and Blackbird. His first book, The King’s Question (Graywolf), won the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson Award; his second, Remembering Lethe, is forthcoming from Able Muse Books. Retired from teaching, he now divides his time between Seattle and New York.