 Communication in Sensation Cyfathrebu yn Sensation this is a declaration of love, shamanist in the lost name of a colour which no longer exists in the language beyond words to express-- I stand breathless in the doorway at the hospice, the portal to bardo between the blurred lines of birth and death in the place that holds no time just Nain my Grandma, Nain in Welsh a hundred and one and a half laughs in the face of her epitaph and then asks me to join her on her journey through death, cryfder I say: absolutely-- yes we begin the dance of marwolaeth we do not know the steps and yet, we dance, we dance ddaear y gwaed as we live life Nain and I follow the lines as they are given we move forward dip our toes into the other side as if to test imaginations crest like the Holy Head coastline tide and then, we return to this realm half glorified, to catch our breath no time between our stars we know we do not know where we are going she reaches her boney hands into the twilight hour, up, up tells me: it’s snowing, it’s snowing-- I see her taste frozen light on her tongue in a language betwixt and between when I was young, she taught me to tie my laces, to tell time, and sound out each letter now, she shows me how to walk through yn marw and speaks in the language of soul we share eyes, surrender control and then we dance again dip our feet into the other side and return, again, fortified next we go deeper into death up to our ankles, our shins, our thighs no time between our stars until we are magnified Pleiades we know where we are going we are waist deep and then, up to our necks in death Nain looks over and into me with her final breath and exits in a language of the sea I know instantly, what she is saying I don’t want her to leave I don’t want her to leave me she tells me mind-to-mind, to mind it’s time she goes on without me, hedfan fly ffarwél music of the unknown wonders cry ffarwél, as she leaves her spirit with me for safe-keeping I hear a million hynafol voices speaking in languages lost to my people weeping, end of oak Celtiberian-ease and stones, end of wind and bardic poems crossbones scattered across the earth in llwch i’r llwch, tones ffarwél to the natural world word, lingua franca of birds heard—pictures oneiric, names of ways of seeing and being honeycomb—hieroglyphic pic’s, alphabetic scripts, all connected to this earth in metaphysics musica universalis metamorphosis symbols of symbols of cyphers of signs coded in code encoded in storylines love is a dangerous threat glottophagy linguicide when the last speaker of a language dies the last words of Nain grow distant and pale almost thin, they grow thin as the human skin one hundred years frail becomes Cain paper becomes a spider web thread in the hail sometimes I am the language that just lost its last speaker not misunderstood, erased deleted by a friend impossible to comprehend maybe that is what leads me to poetry the words of Nain are distant now thinner somehow no time between our stars naill ai ©Sheri-D Wilson Poet Laureate, City of Calgary  Comments are closed.
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