as if one day we simply became lower case, language discarded, ridiculed, titles removed deeds surrendered, paragraphs dismantled; without a willing translator from the outside our speech turned into a babbling of streams shrinking to less than one sentence or phrase little more than a cluster of words fenced in forgotten, the withering of our written word: a blighted crop dying on the page’s landscape. is there a single linguist left to irrigate our hill from this almost empty well or an alchemist who could gather in the final breaths of place: guttural vowels, grunted clods of consonants and create…