A Mouthful of Language
PEACHES
A mouthful of language to swallow:
stretches of beach, sweet clinches,
breaches in walls, pleached branches;
britches hauled over haunches;
hunched leeches, wrenched teachers.
What English can do: ransack
the warmth that chuckles beneath
fuzzed surfaces, sooth velvet
richness, plashy juices.
I beseech you, peach,
clench me into the sweetness
of your reaches.
-Peter Davison
This poem is a delight to read, to say aloud, to chisel out slim tickles of visual context and meaning. Peaches, a humorous ode to the inside-out of adjectives, but then the poet's own elegant rebuttal: descriptions sensual, true, and robust. Do these words that describe the indescribable fail or surpass? Surely Davison amuses us with his riddle of the peach, asking "What is?" in syllables that roll around and off the tongue - of the peach, but not the peach. And then, finally, just the peach. Aren't words grand? As much to love as the stories they tell?
As we approach World Book Night, this great free literature giveaway, I invite you to think about what language speaks to you in its rhymes, prose, sometimes raw and roughhewn power. Give thought to your favorite books and why they remain important and significant to you. Without words would the more subtle and puzzling elements of life elude us? Are words the play we make with the strange experience life is? Stories are organic to life lived and imagined - made of peaches and fires and galaxies, horses pounding through dust over a distant plain. Somewhere, long ago, it was no longer enough to merely watch the prairie lightning, it must be painted on the rock walls. Described in stories of the peoples' exodus, added to the Great Hunt. Words...palaces of frozen time we wonder at again and again.
Celebrate World Book Night on April 23. Open your favorite book and delve into starfish, stairways, deserts, balls of lava, poisoned cake, Cossacks and Caribbean nights, the myths of Rome, plots of Shakespeare, three geese crossing a midnight moon... Enjoy a mouthful of language!
A mouthful of language to swallow:
stretches of beach, sweet clinches,
breaches in walls, pleached branches;
britches hauled over haunches;
hunched leeches, wrenched teachers.
What English can do: ransack
the warmth that chuckles beneath
fuzzed surfaces, sooth velvet
richness, plashy juices.
I beseech you, peach,
clench me into the sweetness
of your reaches.
-Peter Davison
This poem is a delight to read, to say aloud, to chisel out slim tickles of visual context and meaning. Peaches, a humorous ode to the inside-out of adjectives, but then the poet's own elegant rebuttal: descriptions sensual, true, and robust. Do these words that describe the indescribable fail or surpass? Surely Davison amuses us with his riddle of the peach, asking "What is?" in syllables that roll around and off the tongue - of the peach, but not the peach. And then, finally, just the peach. Aren't words grand? As much to love as the stories they tell?
As we approach World Book Night, this great free literature giveaway, I invite you to think about what language speaks to you in its rhymes, prose, sometimes raw and roughhewn power. Give thought to your favorite books and why they remain important and significant to you. Without words would the more subtle and puzzling elements of life elude us? Are words the play we make with the strange experience life is? Stories are organic to life lived and imagined - made of peaches and fires and galaxies, horses pounding through dust over a distant plain. Somewhere, long ago, it was no longer enough to merely watch the prairie lightning, it must be painted on the rock walls. Described in stories of the peoples' exodus, added to the Great Hunt. Words...palaces of frozen time we wonder at again and again.
Celebrate World Book Night on April 23. Open your favorite book and delve into starfish, stairways, deserts, balls of lava, poisoned cake, Cossacks and Caribbean nights, the myths of Rome, plots of Shakespeare, three geese crossing a midnight moon... Enjoy a mouthful of language!
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