ictus

ictus

Tuesday 17 September 2013

Poem with Restored Footnote

The following poem appears in Human Form, where considerations of space meant it was published without what seems to me this essential footnote:

LAST LIVING SPEAKER

               I

(Royal Free Hospital, London, 2009)

After the stroke, English words
escaped you, like a coop
of cacophonous birds
you’d failed to tame.

The dialect of your distant
infancy – that landscape
of stifled voices - re-emerges

in their wake: revenant
of a long-
dead language,
it possesses and reclaims
your abandoned tongue.

 
              II

(Von Humboldt’s Expedition, Venezuela, 1800)


‘In a cage
             hardly permitting
his dog-eared, blue
       -and-yellow pinions
           to extend

we came upon Angel
       in the tribal village
hard by the Orinoco,
                      kidnapped trophy
of their enemies’
           last demise.

From the beak
        of a macaw
I heard at last
             the cut-off tongue
of the Atures; met
     the mournful,
                             gummy eye
               of the oracle-bird
through whose mouth
                           so many voices
are now thrown.’
 
 
Footnote: Without factual precedent Part I yokes the phenomena of stroke-victims’ reversion to a mother tongue they may not have spoken in years to the dying-out of cultural legacies when a last surviving native-speaker passes away (I was thinking particularly of Boa Snr, the last speaker of Bo, a language of the Andaman Islands, who died in 2010). Part 2 adapts an apocryphal anecdote about the famous Prussian explorer (see Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels among Disappearing Languages 2004)