Preservations

How clear was the sky on the day
we burned the old dictionaries,
a batch of German-to-English ones.
Dog-eared, mute and parched,
they had lain for a closed decade’s

unused silence. Little tombs, sprachlos,
we carried them like coals
to a pit in the garden, stacked kindling
and built a pyre of copies,
Bücherverbrennung in the morning.

Their tongues of flames changed colour,
red becoming violet, yellow white,
as if uncertain of their own identity;
pages buckled like breath,
and a ribbon of smoke twisted upwards,

hanging undecided on its next mutation
before turning to a dark wing.
Burning, they sputtered, mumbled,
murmured, perhaps consoling each other,
and I had a sure-fire sense

that verbs burned bluer than nouns,
that adjectives gave off most smoke,
that language was alight
on a fuse running from word to word —
wicks catching, seeds cracking with light,

Waldbrände in a glow of vowels
leaping from one Muttersprache to other
as pages crinkled in kinship.
We held out our hands to the heat
listening to a squabble of voices

claiming origins that darkened and lit again.
And something echoed in us
where translated in our shadows
we watched the last pages writhe,
geist-like, a flicker of inklings.

Terry Jones lives and works in Carlisle. He won the Bridport Prize for poetry in 2011, the same year his collection Furious Resonance was published by Poetry Salzburg.  His poems have appeared in journals, magazines, anthologies, and online, including The New Statesman, Poetry Review, Wasafiri, Iota, The North, The London Magazine, Magma, Agenda, Ambit, The Interpreters House, The Morning Star, Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, The ShoP, New Welsh Review, Planet, The Rialto, Under the Radar, Brittle Star, The Butcher’s Dog etc. Read more of Terry here.