Roots Home

I feel I’m stepping suddenly into a remembered room, with an open piano, maybe, a chair, a view, a familiar ambiance, or rowing over water to an island, or walking a path to the sea. Someone is with me, ahead or following. Who? Did I live that memory? Is it real? Or did I read it in a book?

In the first two minutes I’ve used three words that are on their way to nothing. Daps. Blanco. Grocer. Dying words. A word needs a meaning to pass between speaker and listener, writer and reader, or it’ll come to nothing. Sheenagh Pugh’s ‘Elegy for the Dead Words’ is written in the voice of an old teacher forced to emigrate, one future day, along with all Earth’s inhabitants, to a neighbouring planet. The poem laments the loss of words for all the things left behind. After a lovely litany of favourite words, the poem concludes: ‘Things that are dead we keep with words, but when the words die themselves; oh then they’re dead, and dead indeed’.

Dead words still have a ring about them when they leave common speech. They hold history, words no longer used or needed, words whose objects and purpose are gone, flicker and die, unheard, unread. ‘Daps’ (as we say in Wales) have become ‘trainers’, and I think the ‘Blanco’ with which we whitened them, before putting them on the step to dry in the sun, has gone too. Such words slip painlessly into silence, leaving our tongues long before they leave our memory, to be lost in wordhistory.

While tutoring poetry I often illustrate my sermon against latinates with this example: ‘I was proceeding along the highway when I perceived two persons’, seventeen syllables which I imagine spoken by a policeman bearing witness in court to impress the judge and jury. Translated into words a poet might speak cuts it to ten syllables: ‘I walked down the road and I saw two men’.

Gone the pompous ‘proceeded’, ‘highway’, ‘perceived’, ‘persons’, replaced by ‘walked’, ‘road’, ‘saw’, ‘men’. Even children

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