Some days I can almost hear them, the old people,
behind the rain's mizzle, intimate authors
mumbling their lost language: vowels the open mouths
of azalea, consonants the furrowed trunks
of fir and cedar; a syntax of lichen and vine,
a grammar of rain and mist. Gray-green ancients,
they sway and chant the names of things,
whispering like the half-mad I sometimes glimpse
leaning in boarded doorways or walking
lonely county roads, whose mouths are never still
incessant as riverflow or birdsong in morning
as if searching for some word that would return
whatever answer once flourished in their heads
now uprooted, lost or forgotten.

David Gravender