The Lost Language 3
- The Lost Language 3
When I was too young to remember,I had no name. I was alone in paradise.I know this, but who am I, too old to callback the hands that carried me to bed.I call that world my world, and when I talkthe world calls me you, in my mother’sworried voice. Her hand on my forehead,her scolding, her twitch, the thankless chores,they worry my words before I speak them.My world before I had a world was scaredand pushed a face ahead to bear the blow.When I was forgotten, or feared as much,I woke. Without the language yet, I breathed.I wept pure music would not be consoled. [End Page 125]
The Lost Language 18
Every home is the one I lost to fire.When I speak of it, I have two homes,one of which is missing. When I speakof fire, it climbs the darkness like a church.It lowers a ladder for smoke to escape,angels to descend. I have two fears.I have two passions. The past and its passing.For years I hid the terror of the burningdoors that forged me, transported me,until my dreams had little more to say.But just last night, I asked the startled child,which boy are you. And a look of wondertook the place of fear. It wiped the slate.And the mist of chalk whispered: darker. [End Page 126]
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-seven books including, most recently, Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), and The Calling (Parlor, 2020). Five books are forthcoming including Behemoth (winner of New Criterion Poetry Prize, Criterion Books), Patmos (winner of the Juniper Prize, U of MA Press), and Invention of the Wilderness (LSU).
