- Preservation of Rare Languages
Now and then, while writing poems,we sense the Holy Spirit move us to prayfor the preservation of rare languages,Zazao Papia-kristang Kanakanavu
old world tongues whistling in valleys,school children chanting geographyrunning on archipelagoes with sea birdsbefore imperialists cast a linguicidal shadow
across the land. As we pray, languagesare zephyrs, pure eddies of air, transparentminnows, wind as an arm or blue breathembracing to preserve nag'iksapa
on a three-inch nickel rosetta, a thousandtexts in one glass marble, this encased world.Newspapers report one rare languagewhose last soul, a woman, is dying
with no one around to interpret.Others aren't rare as one might think,spoken in a couple villages, Aramaic.Clicking languages are rare, those split
into lost dialects after war or exile.Women speak languages to childrento keep tongues alive. Memoryof domestic activities witnessed
not written by mosquitoes, nushu women tradepoems parceled with rice or uttered in long lines.A woman believes a poem grows like a melon.How does a melon grow? In the sun after soft rains
on a vine, small before it's heavy when you take a knife.A poem preserves its own flesh in the sweet sunwith the firmness of a rind in syllabic concatenationsbeyond a dominant language. In one century [End Page 90]
thousands of languages will vanish.Spoken flame hovers over a mouthin the fading world of an octogenarianwoman with a flame at her throat
streaming in lost alphabets or hieroglyphicspressed in clay, inked on papyrus, carved in skieswherever we live. We are kitchen fires in the darkwhen we carry water to our families, when we wash
after a time of fasting, when we carry a wedding harpor a shawl thin enough to pull through a gold ring,conversing about the time of fat melons and birds.We walk home with hand-dyed batistes for coverings
or run up a flight of stairs if the elevator's stalled.We say the wealth of night, the lowest, is te po i teturithe round moon eclipsed as a syntagm vanishesin a pool of oblivion
without soundcompared to this phrasetranslated as thisor this .… [End Page 91]
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Ardor (2008) and In Medias Res (2004). The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she chairs the English department at a small Christian college in southern California, where she is also a novice harpist.