The Gift

Our neighbour from Ulster, a hound for the hard work
an eye for the quick money, the angle in a rumour
and for sure a Masters degree in gallows humour
last week found a young beast dead from a tumour
so he carted it to the village, his prize winning stirk
dropped off his harvest thanksgiving gift for the kirk.

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 from these brief fragments of sound
an echo much louder than its diminished source?