Words –
Like the air I breath
There as long as I have life
Even if I couldn’t say them
Write them or even hear them
They’d be inside of me
And I would know them
lyrically yours – stephanie c brown
Imagine a world with no words spoken or unspoken. Of course, you can not because even in imagining there are words. Every image, every emotion, your brain is naming or trying to. Words are so important that we have words to describe our relationship with words. We are at a loss for them; we are moved by them; we are hurt by them; we are healed by them; we search for them; we borrow them; we steal them; we use them; we wish we had them; we remember them; we forget them; we go places and have experiences without our bodies with them. We use words for all of these.
What a mystery words are. I am writer and have been as long as I can remember and before, but I do not know how true my words are for others. I found a wide-ruled, black composition book from the first grade. Before I knew cursive, in large print letters with misspelled words, I wrote about a goat who drove a car and smoked a cigarette. That goat had no basis in reality, but it was in my head and I had words to express it although not well. There is so much I wonder about that goat and the little girl who invented him. I am prone to flights of fantasy, and I find words to express them.
JK Rowling, who certainly knows the power of words and has made a lot of money from words, describes words as the most inexhaustible source of magic we have. Think about it. How many worlds created by words have you visited. How many concepts have you grasped because you either read or heard words spoken or written by someone else. We write them, we speak them, we hear them, but what their force is invisible- magic.
Do words ever die? When no one, no one at all, speaks them or writes them or remembers them, maybe they are dead, but their influence never dies. A language many be “dead”, but its shaping power on a culture or society lives on.
Emily Dickenon’s crystal clear succient words in her poem “Dead Words” writes of words:
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
I say the same is true once a word is written. The words I think and never speak or write affect me. The ones I speak or write affect other people. I write for both reasons.
I even have words to describe when I have no words.
Soul of the Past
If I had a video of every moment of my life
I would have nothing but images and sounds.
When my eyes are closed and I hear nothing
Then my past comes to me.
It shifts and changes
So I never really know it
But the emotions remain
For they are the soul of the past.
lyrically yours -stephanie c brown
When I started this blog post, I planned to write about the power of words to create. Instead I wrote the words that came to me. Who knows where words come from? As a lover of words and a writer, I have spent hours writing these words and loving writing.
Comments are so appreciated.
