Ben La Farge
WHAT BLOODCELLS UNDERSTAND
Slowly we learn what bloodcells understand:
Birth is the speech of seed, the still unknown,
But death is the oldest language of the land.
Amphibian wings, the ape's prehensile hand,
Flutter within our fingers' flesh and bone,
But slowly we learn what bloodcells understand :
City and dinosaur, buried beneath the sand,
Tell us in tongues of skeleton and of stone
Death is the oldest language of the land.
In kernel and egg and womb the seeds expand,
Bursting the husk, the shell, the liquid zone,
Till slowly we learn what bloodcells understand:
Death is the
gift
the gods of earth demand,
Speaking in tongues of fissure and of cone;
Death is the oldest language of the land.
Birth is the speech of trees before they stand,
The speech of seed before the root is grown,
But slowly we learn what bloodcells understand:
Death is the oldest language of the land.
Angela Ball
JAMAICA
I'm here the small hour
after a foursquare rain , water still
leaning in
pools,
light draining back
to the streets.
The Mood Club's like the inside
