The Lost Language

by Michael Kiesow Moore

I dream of finding a lost language,
a language that has no words for war
or any kind of violence a human can
make against another.
This old, forgotten language
will be wise in the use of gender,
not binary.
This language won’t even have the
word for binary.
And this will be a language that has more
words for love than the colors of
a large box of crayons,
each word a new shade of care,
and so vast that dictionaries fill
to the brim with every different hue.
And all the colors of the human clan
will be described by those words of love,
for when you speak of your fellow
beings with love,
how could you ever harm one?
If we cannot find this long, lost language,
then let us make it now.

Published in the Saint Paul Almanac: On a Collected Path (Volume 11).