Garrison Keillor's Poetry Hour

I don't mean to be cliche and cheesy, but I was on the way to the bathroom and literally stopped in my tracks when I heard this poem by W.S. Merwin. I'm going to post it here just because I really want to share it. This is the kind of poem that makes me excited to write poetry again; it is also the kind of poem that makes me so, so intimidated. To know there is such a poem out there (among countless others) that just SAYS it right, says something I've felt before but could never say in a beautiful way.... . But. I will never get there if I don't try. So I'll start trying again.

By the way---. I can't say I understand everything about this poem, but I do know that I love it and want to read it over again. I do know that I get the gist-----. That is enough, I think.

"Losing a Language" - W.S. Merwin

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what the words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw