An infant's first words provoke jubilation in the parent and there are few among us who are not curious to learn of the famous last words of the great and good.
In between life's bookends lies a massive accumulation of words, significant or otherwise, many of which we may well regret having spoken.
As a child, I was drawn to words and, indeed verse, by means of nursery rhymes.
It's surprising how many of those tales were downbeat. Jack and Jill's unfortunate tumble, Humpty Dumpty's premature demise and poor Little Miss Muffet's traumatic encounter with a spider: these gloomy tales created a decidedly negative impression of the world that awaited me beyond the safety of the family home.
IF WORDS WERE WORMS
If words were worms that warmly went
from A to B beneath our feet
in worthy earth, absorbed, content,
through coffin-wood to winding-sheet
they might diminish, as they fed,
the boredom of the lonely dead
who surely must find wearisome
that endless nothingness, their lot:
unmoving lips, tongues rendered dumb.
Were words, like worms, to breach each cot
then pale flesh might become a page
on which to document their rage.
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