Talking about our feelings
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It took time for feelings to enter language.
We began with sibilants, barks,
then pointing, so of course they did –
what is the ostensive for Schadenfreude?
Just as vocalizations migrate
toward the front of our shiftless mouths
from the back of our throat. In English,
we had wrã∂; Norse gave us angr.
But it takes time to receive a word
and make use of it: to even say I am angry
is still impossible for my father,
near though he is to his story’s end,
and were he to say it, it would be
but the first gusts in the anemometer’s alveoli
to the hurricane’s intricate pedesic fireworks,
not to mention their path back
to the spiracular exhalation
onto an anemone in Lhasa
from an Asian swallowtail.
But who am I to say?
I spend much of my life
monitoring what I am feeling
and I am no Sybil with my guesses.
It feels like catching wind
with your bare hands.
Sometimes people just click
their collection box closed
and say to themselves
mission accomplished –
but I have the suspicion
that we were handed keys
to a just-demolished castle.
- Charles Byrne is an erstwhile teacher of psychology and a writer with other poems forthcoming or recently published in Birmingham Poetry Review, Meridian, and Stonecoast Review.
- Email: byrne@rocketmail.com
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