Before The Word Poem by Keki Daruwalla

Before The Word

Rating: 3.2


Corn is great, on the cob or otherwise,
but before corn in the ear there was life.
Fire is holy especially for Zoroastrians,
but before fire too there was life.
Before the bowstring and the flint arrow sang,
there was life.

The word is great,
yet there was life before the word.
We can't turn romantic and say
we were into bird speech or river-roar then,
into the silence of frost
or the language of rain.
But forest speech and swamp speech
came through easier to us.
When lightning crashed,
the cry of the marsh bird was our cry,
and we flung ourselves to the other branch
like any other baboon.

As winter whined on windy cliff,
we shivered with the yellow grass.
In winter-dark a hundred eyes
flared yellow in the jungle scrub.
When seasons changed, blood coursed with sap
and flowered in meadows. We were at home.
Nor eyes nor bat cries bothered us.
What if we didn't know
a bat assessed reality
from the ricochet of its cry?

Though there were no words,
fear had a voice with many echoes.
Worship was quieter, adoration
spoke only through the eyes or knees.

What was it like before language dropped like dew,
covering the scuffed grass of our lives?

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Upendra Aida 12 January 2018

Great poem loved it.

2 0 Reply
Deepak Kumar Pattanayak 12 January 2018

There is neither any proof nor even a regular history in the accepted sense of the word that this world existed not without word though words as language came into being in course of time...........very insightful and brilliantly composed.............thanks for sharing

0 0 Reply
Ramesh Rai 05 January 2014

After reading this poem again and again i come to the conclusion the entire creation is expressed through words.

0 0 Reply
Ramesh Rai 05 January 2014

After reading this poem again and again i come to the conclusion the entire creation is expressed through words.

0 0 Reply
READ THIS POEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES
Keki Daruwalla

Keki Daruwalla

Lahore / British India (Pakistan)
Close
Error Success