Vox Populi
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Barbara E. Young: About the Language. And Inevitable Death
Once upon a time
(and this is before you or I
or your mother or the dry disappearing women
who live under bridges were born)
words—some
words—had meanings unlike today’s.
Night, for instance.
And Alone. Alone, alone could fill all the space
between all the yellow cities on the map with a hollow
more empty than the echo of the emptiest of moved-from homes,
dust where the dresser was, a penny, half a toothpick.
But we live in pre-owned valleys and cook
on the stove that came with the house.
Wearing heirloom language to work, to regret,
to shop for our suppers, we name common things.
And say we die and go to heaven.
Call the yellow night sky black.
Copyright Barbara E. Young. From Heirloom Language by Barbara E. Young (Madville, 2021)
Barbara E. Young, her husband Jim and their two cats live in White Bluff, Tennessee, near Nashville.
A house in the Rush Historic District, an abandoned mining town in the Ozark Mountains (photo: Keith Dotson)
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Barbara—I loved this poem. The more I read it, the more I admire the way you weave the surprising images. They make a kind of web or structure of tone and affect that underlies the “story” or “argument”. So those homeless women show up in the empty spaces between habitations, and in the distortions of perception, visible in the language we use, that make us unrooted from reality in our own homes.
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“echo of the emptiest of moved-from homes”. Oh I love this.
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