Lost in Translation & Reverberation I

Two of my poems were published by Irreantum in their Restorations edition: Lost in Translation and Reverberation I.

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Lost in Translation

Just south of here sits the staid storehouse
that safeguards recovered fragments
of leftover meaning
that couldn’t make the leap—
those bone-deep understandings
that float away like ash
as a phrase passes from German to Hindi,
or from Turkish to Thai.

They come with butterfly nets
to rescue the fluttering phonemes
and load them into the truck
for the trip back to Peoria
where they are carefully shelved
according to what they failed to convey—
hurt, beauty, spirit,
or that certain texture of snow.

There they sit, sometimes for centuries,
until the world finally learns how hygge feels,
or knows the angst of Weltschmerz,
and they are released again into the wild
and are found.