Speak Poem by Joanna Hamilton

Canoes? All right then
Shall we go canoeing…or kayaking?
Shall we go?
We shall go canoeing
As the ancient natives did,
They who now decay in peace.
Their canoe was wooden
Mine is metal – Ours,
Ours is metal
Metal from the earth
Where they now decay
With their hands folded neatly
Upon their stomachs
Hands that speak.
But words are spoken?
The words are silent,
The language gone, divided up.
But we are not divided
Like fractions in a math class
What is there to divide us?
Nothing – and everything
For nothing is everything and
Everything is nothing
But the center will hold
Things will not fall apart
We are divided but
We are one in
Language that longs to be spoken
Waiting silently for tongues to
Travel upon it after so
Many centuries unspoken.
Perhaps a worthier speaker,
Perhaps someone less so,
But we will speak with our tongues removed
We will see with our eyes blind
We will speak the silent words while
The hands rot gracefully in the dirt.
The hands that hold onto the language
That could have saved us all

If only the hands had lived
Like us in our canoe –
Paddling on across the waters
That connect us – are everything and nothing to us –
In the metals from the ground by the
Grave with the blind, the speechless,
The hands frail and broken
That no longer speak
The words they gave
For we do not give without taking,
Want without receiving
For we will not be lonely, alone, sad
For we take when we give,
Receive what we want,
We are given all
So why do we take?
We have food, land,
We are not alone
We are not lonely
We are not sad,
We are in a canoe made of metal
In water that connects us all
Above the dirt that holds
The graves that are not lonely
Are not alone
Are not sad
Are in peace decomposing
For centuries of not speaking.
The silent language is all around,
Are we worthy of its greatness?
Its power?
Or are we unworthy
For we do not speak silently –
Our hands are still upon the
Air, but our tongues shall
Move though theirs were removed –
We will talk with the soul
Which we all possess as we
Drift along giving and taking,
Wanting and receiving, not lonely
Neither alone nor sad.
We shall speak on the shore
In the dirt when our hands decay
And our tongues are removed while our eyes are blind
We shall paddle our canoe to theirs
And we shall speak.