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)