LANGUAGE AS POWER
(For L&B)

The beginning was the Word: God
As polymath distributed syllables
To perfect seasons in the land,
Our sense of edifice, of stars:
Om, Alpha, the Limitless, Mahalo Om.
Graces affirmed humble call to
Prayer, prophecy; perpetual whisper
Impelling bud to rose; the adjectival
Poise of mountain, sea and plain.

The Word travelled, tilted, soared
In songs unfolding fragrances;
Arched across double rainbows
Multiplied lush, humming islands,
Entered the hot blood of Halemaumau;
The scaling orioles of the sun,
The dedicating frangipani as it fell.

Riding glistening surfaces of wind,
Voices shot from conjugating hearts.
Each seamless chant will ever bind
Rama-Sita, Adam-Eve, Gikonyo-Mumbi
Whose redeeming myths still numinate,
Render precise the march of history.

The start of speech communities, natal
Semantic loads, empires, Kachru circles;
Vigilant certainty against forked tongue,
As assertive tribes insinuate authority,
Invent command, extend language into power.
Neo-power into language, the play of words.

Then the Word begot TEFL, TESOL
And TG, ways of discourse, meta-fiction,
Streams of specialists whose disciples
Hypothesised, quarreled, exported heresies.
Then some perceived avatars, a third eye,
Ancestral voices in the twilight
Of the creek, the serpent and the rope,
Felt how the hills are distant as they
Watched the glow behind shifty verbs.

Wordsworth in the tropics: daffodils mutate.
Out of the parley in the tents, a fresh
Vocabulary, equal, reconciling Englishes
Dismantle white umbras through synonyms
Translating psyches, achieving metaphors,
Defining room for mutual, fresh realities,
A calculus for fellowship of language
As power, as making, as release.

Edwin Thumboo

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