waiting for a train (no, really)

[fahye]

About to head off to Brussels after spending a wonderful weekend in Oxford with dr_biscuit and husband. Maybe one day I will return when it is not almost too cold to be outside.

We saw The King's Speech; I adored it, and of course the reference to shell-shock collided in my head with all the stuff about stammers in the Regeneration trilogy and, well, this happened. 20% King George, 20% Billy Prior, 60% excuse to alliterate a lot.

~

speech therapy

Between my teeth and the tip of my tongue
is Timbuktu: a city's span of sibilance,
stuttered streets and missing sounds.
No hiss of gas. My palate holds impossible
peaks of pristine mountains, iced and marbled, pale.

What can't you say, my boy,
my brave bold boy with bombed-out
eyes and ceasefire sighs
-- repeat it ten times fast. Go on.
What is it you can't say?

This is not my language, this lump of lead
laid in the larynx. From the clutch of my throat
to the edge of my lips is the earth to the sun,
a sprained and spitless space;
my voice the vacuum. My language lost.

Could hear a pin drop into the mud
of far-off fields, the flutter of fingers awake
and afraid on folded sheets. What won't you say?
My own tongue, sympathetic, dries to stone.
I could be deaf but for the clock.

My silence is the sound before shells,
when worn and wet we wait the same eternity
that exists when I open my mouth.
In the pause before each consonant
six soldier's lifetimes tick by.

Comments

[laleia.livejournal.com]

I love the alliteration!

[skygiants]

My silence is the sound before shells

Oh, this is gorgeous.

[genarti]

Oh, wow. That's gorgeous.

[dejablue7.livejournal.com]

Very nice :)

[buhfly.livejournal.com]

This is beautiful.

[inknose.livejournal.com]

mmm... alliteration. I am a huge nerd and actually had to say some of these lines out loud because they sounded so awesome.

[normalhumanbein.livejournal.com]

This is gorgeous.

And this bit:

What can't you say, my boy,
my brave bold boy with bombed-out
eyes and ceasefire sighs
-- repeat it ten times fast. Go on.
What is it you can't say?


...I'll just be over in the corner, clutching at my heart.

[sour-idealist.livejournal.com]

I want to stand on a Broadway stage or a Roman amphitheater or a concert hall and just declaim this to the entire world, tasting every syllable. I actually got partway through the second verse and scrolled back up to the top and read it all over again out loud, and then I did that again. Wow. "This lump of lead laid in the larynx," "bombed-out eyes and ceasefire sighs," the repetition of "what is it you can't say? what won't you say?" - it all just kills me. I love it.

[littledust.livejournal.com]

Beautiful.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I think it especially elegant that you have made use of difficult sounds and sound clusters, considering the subject matter. Brava. :)