My new friend from Paris tells me
we think of friendship differently.
"Friends are of
more consequence to me,"
he says.
He reserves an entire verb
conjugation for friends.
Perhaps he would start this poem,
"A woman I met from Akron tells me..."
Language bounds thinking.
(I think.)
Are we missing the depths of concepts, too,
thanks to our own binding dictionary?
Like the Arabic "ya'arburnee"
defined as the hopeful declaration
that I might leave the world
before my love.
"May you bury me."
And could we all have words
like the German "kummerspeck?"
("Excessive weight gained from emotional overeating")
By literally naming it "grief bacon,"
is its mental load lighten
by language alone?
Maybe the A.I. machines
will figure out an ideal earthly language
and teach us humans how to talk
and think
better.
By Morgan Lasher