Tongues

 

TONGUES

I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than ye all --

glad my reading of Mr Gloucester in Mr Shakespeare's play was liked so much by that paper --

yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding,

I'd rather read 5 words that would go in a flier about throwing bottles away,

that by my voice I might teach others also,

if this will help others understand,

than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue --

than 10,000 in the tongue of 400 years ago.

(Bible reference 1 Corinthians 14. 18-19, Authorised Version; other lines made using Up-goer Five Text editor http://bit.ly/1lfezKI )

This poem is another written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week.  The prompt, by guest author Philip Gross, was for a macaronic poem -- one written in two or more languages, or two or more registers of English.  So I took a direct quotation from the Authorised Version of the Bible, and rendered it into the 1000-word vocabulary of Up-goer Five.  I wrote more about Up-goer Five in February 2013.

The poem has now found publication in the Indian magazine RIC.  The magazine title is an acronym for Red In Corner, one of its tenets being "No sublime human creation is perfect; it’s the little failed detail, the RIC, that turns it into a masterpiece."