The Matter of Languages

Of languages and men:
Yes, let us now talk of the thousand
languages and dialects of men,
of colliding words that rise up
like plumage of flames
in the Babylonian skies.

How each nation or country now
aspire to assert the primacy
of its own major language and
the survival of its hundreds,
perhaps, even thousands of
its antique and perishing dialects
and languages in the sphere
of our globalizing times.

Yes, we have defenders of
the so-called indigenous languages,
and for whatever presumed noble
purposes, we can only bow in
muted respect at their allianced
missions and hard-stands,
and hope that, in the end, everyone
may be humble enough to realize
that only the Silence is the true
universal language of humankind.

Love as such is another higher,
nobler kind of universal language, too,
and what of our ungeographical spirit
that comes out from the womb
of this undivided Universe, what
then of the Universal Fatherhood
of God, whose real language stays
in secret in the heart of everyone.

O Defenders of inherently lost causes,
search within your deeper selves
the unwritten languages of your soul -
and beyond all words and conflicts,
only God's Word is the shining and true
language of the soul!

Rolando A. Carbonell