Soraya Peerbaye
Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names
From the suite of poems that give the collection its title: botany meets linguistics.
In a museum farther north is the only recording of the Yaghan tongue. Ferns of language pressed into the soft wax cylinders of an Edison phonograph, recored a century ago. Their grammar integrated perspective. Your name would be different if I called to you from a canoe, or from the shore; your name would be different if earth or water lay between us.
And what lays between us and the poem: words on the page or words in the air. Reminding us that our names are not ourselves.
And so for day 2813
25.08.2014