Ryan Derenberger is a freelance journalist and editor, a Journalism and AP Language teacher at Whitman HS in Bethesda, MD, and the founder of 'The Idea Sift.' He also serves on the board of directors for student journalism nonprofit 'Kidizenship.'
We don’t look at words.
Not these.
Words are too lacking,
so, we avert our attention away
from the strange shapes they make,
the colors that cut
towards rhymes and take
memory and emotion to run,
transparency away.
We do not look at words.
How often we have read
the word black and not noticed
the letters themselves?
We may leave words in neutral, idling,
but when we forget to take
lexicons by the hand,
to define them all again and again,
our dictionaries, sleek as last moment,
may slip out our ears and land.
We don’t look at faces either.
Have you noticed?
We don’t look at the ears we carry
unless they’re enormous,
protruding either way
for their purpose.
We don’t look at the bare utility
of our snouts
flipping cards in a memory game we play.
We don’t look at the mouth
contorting our sound waves.
In fact, we don’t look at anything at all.
I can barely scream from this view
as I still pick and choose
certainties to be heard by you,
but these are echoes in you.
For you I rewrote
For you I rewrote
the entire dictionary
the entire dictionary
of every language
of every language
a thousand times.
a thousand times.
Every definition, I changed to
Every definition, I changed to
“one web of words.”
“one web of words.”
In a warehouse,
they’re stacked, they are.
Books upon books,
conversations upon conversations,
augmented language
where none have ever won.
I assure you of this — that’s all and less
as I reposition my construction hat,
“Not me with this one; no one.”
We each take a breath
while dictionaries topple
to the fresh, concrete floor.
Push them aside.
We’ll continue to tour yours.
Words have not just communicative value, but they represent an accurate way of living in and looking at reality.
THE SIFT
Words, simple little words, impose limits on how we see our world, and cataclysmic is the effect of their being exposed. Words’ interwoven definitions, we would do well to remember, rest only on each other. And so, truthful, we must wonder.
