Words are ghosts, in whom the past keeps coming alive: a poem by James McCabe

Take English for instance, one of the immortals,
With a Saxon axe, word made flesh made skeleton.
The broken dactyl fingers, the homemade poetry
Only a battlefield, under a Viking sky.
History and language, prisoners of each other.

Which is why we read stories between the storylines,
Under a chainmail rain, the Cyclops' blinded eye.
Words have lives they themselves cannot carry over,
So much semantic luggage, borrowed currency.
Words die and are born. Not one lasts a thousand years.

As if someone, deep in the future, reading this,
Came away defeated, unable to make out
The Gothic fossils and the earthquake vowel shifts
Scribbled in an unknown tongue. The manuscript left
As illegible wreck. Words are Trojan horses.

But poets, whose job consists of walking back to
Paradise, dream of a Blue and White Nile at the
Confluence of tongues, where the last woolly mammoth
Trapped standing in ice, comes clean in a summer thaw.
Come poet, let us build in the ox-house of the word.

James McCabe's first book was The White Battlefield of Silence. He is the winner of the British Council Millennium Award for his Oxford doctorate, The Neutral Heart: Irish Poetry and World War II