listening to Tristram and Isolde while pinning fabric

[incandescens]

Lazy day. Caught up on sleep. Sorted stuff. Wrote.

---

The Icelandic Language

In this language, no industrial revolution;
no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.

In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.

But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

The woman with marble hands whispers
this language to you in your sleep; faces
come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

In this language, you can't chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can't
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last.

Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

-- Bill Holm

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Lovely poem, but is Icelandic really like that? He make sit sound like Hebrew.

[incandescens]

I'm afraid I honestly don't know. I just came across the poem.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

It does seem to be. (Disclaimer: I don't speak it. I know people who do. I've been there a couple of times.) And Holm tells all sorts of truths in his poems, so I'd believe this one.

(Icelandic is one of those languages where language purism holds sway, and where words are made up for new things rather than loan-words taken. It's a fascinating language with a bewildering-to-me number of inflections.)

[incandescens]

Interesting to know! Thank you.

[marith.livejournal.com]

What a gorgeous poem.

[incandescens]

It is, yes.