WORDS FILL THE WHOLE UNIVERSE Poem by Michelle Grangaud

Words fill the whole universe, like light, but unlike light they have no shadow.
The chorus causes the temperature to drop.
How very strange, an object without a shadow.
Since I had no shadow, I vaguely thought that each word had its opposite, its antonym. I thought too
vaguely: not all words have antonyms.
A word without an antonym seems to me, like a body without a shadow, a curious anomaly.
Temperature is part of an order.
Nevertheless, that is so.
I have tried to understand what is meant by this concept of antonym. Up to now, it has seemed
rather vague to me.
Man is the antonym of Woman, and vice versa, but Girl and Boy are not antonyms. Indeed,
Son has no antonym either. It would seem that one is not born the antonym of the other sex,
but that one becomes so though the processes of conjugation.
Contrary to what I would
have thought beforehand (although it seems I had all sorts of wrong ideas
on the subject), antonymy does not only operate in couples, far from it. With antonyms,
polygamy appears to be the norm, and monogamy stands as an exception.
In all cases, however, non-closed systems exist, such as Yesterday, Today,
Tomorrow. Yesterday and Tomorrow are antonyms of Today, Today and Tomorrow
are antonyms of Yesterday, but only Today is the antonym of Tomorrow. Yesterday
is not the antonym of Tomorrow, as the past is not the exact opposite of the future.
Form has many antonyms, including Matter and Subject, which for their part have no antonyms.
The same goes for Spirit, the antonyms of which include Letter, whereas Letter
has no antonyms. At least in my dictionary.