Ideas are undead.
Encyst them in words.
Stick the words in mud.
Bake and stack the mud.
Leave the mud alone
For a hundred years
Or a thousand years
Or a few thousand.
Let some human hosts
Or potential hosts
Come root through the mud.
If the bricks aren’t smashed,
If some words remain,
Oh yes, inert words
Of inert ideas,
Lost thousands of years,
And if the damp brains
Of the possible
Hosts recognize words
And masticate them
Trying to ingest
What earlier hosts
In those wiser days,
In those garden days,
Might have had to say,
Then translation wets
The dormant ideas
And they spring to life,
And the hosts, poor saps,
Carry them around,
Spreading them about,
Infecting others.
The soul of the cow,
The builder of walls,
The sage of the way,
The tricker of gods,
Endurers of floods,
Fires, punishments, plagues,
And iconoclasts,
Emerge, ravenous
Without digestion,
Toothy without mouths,
Lustful without sex,
Moaning for more brains.
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