The Last Word

What happens when a language dies?
Do we lose a world of birth and echoes,
aspen and granite, tears and tongues?
Do gods expire when
the last word evaporates
on the only speaker's
final breath?
What, then, will anchor
that last life
among the living?

Will the name of a color never
be spoken again, or heard,
or the name of a beast, an idea,
a bird? What becomes
of a thing without a name
in any other language?
And what if two people remain
who speak that language,
and they're not talking?

^

Biography

Ex-pat doc, living in US; driven/sustained by familial compulsion to write. Most of her publications have been in medical journals and textbooks, but she has had poetry published previously in Electric Acorn.