Gedicht
Philip Gross
from Vocable
from Vocable
from Vocable
Ninety now, you’re adrift on the vowel-stream,the crisp edge of all your five languages gone
and we’re back to the least of language. It’s all one,
your, his or my slight modulations of the bare
vowel of animal need . . . though even there
how they give us away, our vowel sounds:
class, place, family secrets, the wrong
school or side of the blanket or overstayed
visa, let slip, between one consonant
and the next.
Erect
a fence of plosives, dentals and fricatives
as we will . . . in times of war and weather
we can’t stem the vowel-flood; it will swell,
barely articulate. No border can contain it;
it will seep, erode, find
cracks; it will break through.
© 2011, Philip Gross
From: Deep Field
Publisher: Bloodaxe, Tarset
An extract from the poem “Vocable”, from the forthcoming collection Deep Field, which will be published by Bloodaxe in November 2011.
Published with kind permission of the author.
From: Deep Field
Publisher: Bloodaxe, Tarset
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from Vocable
Ninety now, you’re adrift on the vowel-stream,the crisp edge of all your five languages gone
and we’re back to the least of language. It’s all one,
your, his or my slight modulations of the bare
vowel of animal need . . . though even there
how they give us away, our vowel sounds:
class, place, family secrets, the wrong
school or side of the blanket or overstayed
visa, let slip, between one consonant
and the next.
Erect
a fence of plosives, dentals and fricatives
as we will . . . in times of war and weather
we can’t stem the vowel-flood; it will swell,
barely articulate. No border can contain it;
it will seep, erode, find
cracks; it will break through.
From: Deep Field
An extract from the poem “Vocable”, from the forthcoming collection Deep Field, which will be published by Bloodaxe in November 2011.
Published with kind permission of the author.
from Vocable
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