Missing Words for the World

Words slip away, disused.
In forgotten hollows in the hills,
Names for land or the shapes of land
Discolour and decay.

There is a silence which
Disconnects the tongue and its understanding;
Without knowledge the eyes in turn, fail.
Rain or mist, falls like ignorance.

Were there ever words?
For how grassland slopes to a river;
For the rattled light of sun through pinewood;
For the high leaning ground on its bedrock.

If so, no-one speaks them now.
Bird song is a whisper;
Grass stems arch under the wind's dumbness;
Incoherent water ripples over stones.

So are our senses diminished.
Our mouths, desensitized and numb,
Have nothing to say.

Nothing to mark the changing light
As noon hustles the day away from morning;
Nothing for the cleft rock shadows;
Nor for the fern it hides,
Nor its fragments
Shattered on a chill night
Lying frost-kicked and broken.

We built this silence for ourselves,
With our doors and shelters.
The world is roofed and windowed.
What is outside can no longer enter
Our nests of wires and shadowed corners
Where the secrets we have come to treasure rest.

Our ears are dull; all sound is muffled now.
Our eyes are glazed and we see through the barrier panes
With something less than sight.
A false spectrum plays in our vision:
Colours, abstractions, shifting patterns,
A flickering, frame-by-frame illusion.

We embrace the world, second-hand.
Seeing, hearing, touching;
First, we name the ways
Then, stifled in our overheated rooms,
With our creature-comforts and all their trappings,
We sit or lie back, dreaming.

Beyond glass screen and curtain, just beyond,
Where there is weather and time passing,
Our words now run as dry as desert
In whose sparse stone canyons we see nothing
Shapes and shimmering haze
Nothing of importance
Nothing we could name.

© BH 2015

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The Oxford dictionary has removed words such as 'acorn' and 'catkin' in favour of words like 'broadband' and 'megabyte'. We name the things we see, of course. We forget how we no longer see the things we do not name.

Piece by piece the world shrinks. In our pursuit of ever-present everything, our electronic and immediate universe becomes apparently real but farther off than ever.

I share the sadness at the loss of words for land, place and landscape, the more so when we believe we know more and more about the world as it trickles into our devices. We forget the filters and the manipulation between us and it. 

We need all the words we can use. Not as a definition of reality. (All reality is virtual, isn't it?) But as a way to understand it; and it's reflection in us.

Now, we need to remember, when the word for world is a download just a click away and the world itself a flicker on a screen near you, we still need to physically move in it. Meaning is there in a way beyond wiki. Meaning binds us to the world. Shades of meeaning make us understand it.