President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called December 7th “a date which will live in infamy,” because it was on this day in 1941 that Japanese planes attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor. More than 2,300 Americans died in the attack, and the United States joined World War II, which it had stayed out of the war for more than two years, adhering to its policy of neutrality in Europe’s affairs.
If Only Life Were Like Language
by Paul Hostovsky
If Only Life Were Like Language
and all the natural resources like words,
then the world would be
an unambiguously better place.
Because when you use a word
like apocalypse, say, it doesn’t then follow
that there is one less apocalypse to go around––
there are still an infinite number of apocalypses,
more than enough for everyone. And the more
people who use a language the more
the language grows rich and strong
and resourceful and ramifying
with new and far-out ways of saying things,
not to mention all the lexical borrowings that go on,
the exotic words and phrases, and the names––
names of dinosaurs and flowers
and racehorses and hurricanes––
and the lists, praise be to God for the lists!
Which is just the opposite of the world
with its dying rivers and dwindling resources
and endangered species list.
With words you can make stuff up out of nothing
which is more than you can say
for physics or chemistry or corn. Earth’s
the right place for language. I don’t know where
else you could invent an imaginary escape hatch
up and out of a dying world,
and take a little of the world with you in your pockets
like the jingling coins of a realm,
or like the crepitating bits and pieces
of a beautiful intact dead language
for sprinkling over the smart lunch conversation
in the next.
“If Only Life Were Like Language” by Paul Hostovsky from Is That What That Is. FutureCycle Press © 2017.
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 