WORD CANTO
Copyright © 1996, 2006
Jason Lester Atkins
985 Fleet Drive, #347
Virginia Beach, VA 23454
All Rights Reserved.
At the beginning of everything is "The Word" . . .
Miracles to which we owe the fact
That we are human. These mysterious and perfidious
Phenomena can be songs of hope, or slings of pain,
Each containing their own little solar systems of meaning.
Like tools from the cave, learned late
And laboriously, they hold sounds belonging to several
Senses at once; as if each one has eyes
Ears and tongue, or hands and fingers,
With a body to move with. These little demons
In words provide their life. These selected breathing
Sounds determine the identity of an individual, or nation.
One fat electrician jumped the fence in a Gdansk shipyard
With one word, "solidarity", in his mouth that
was mightier than the threat of ten divisions.
He overcame "Communism"; that mesmerizing synonym for a
Just world, but being used instead as a club by the ruling state
To bludgeon millions of farmers from family lands.
The whole world watched, as the proud marching words
"National Socialism", developed the administrative bureaucracy
Capable of building a bonfire of six million bodies;
To light the new path for our modern drug word,
"Rights". This created another soothing synonym for special power
To deny ones actual apprehension of what its like
To be oneself. Hidden deep beneath the bright
Surface of a meliorative ideal, the "Social
Engineering" ship founders on the cruel concealed
Rocks of human nature. Still yet, word pictures
Provide our brains with inaudible music that moves
Us along from moment to moment like waters
In a river. The words are the materials from which
We carve our memories and the sweet blocks of
Redemptive hope, fashioned into arias, love songs and sonnets.
This answering hope may lie buried beyond man's horizon
Of responsible choice, into that realm wherein dwells
"The Word", that was the beginning, and is not "The Word" of man.
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