Vanity Press dept.

-Stephen (Steg)
"Word making is world making."
     ~ _The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis_
          by Avivah Zornberg

This inspired me to dig out an old poem, still probably not finished.

"An Introduction to Linguistic Science"
(For A. L. B.)

Om! May there be no hindrance.  Speak the word
and worlds will be created.  Let there be
breath before sound or sense, the name deferred,
as sight exists before the will to see.
Or did the ancestors first speak the world?--
and words were:  ah, cerebral mystery,
amazing to them as the fire.  They heard
the power, and ever afterward were free.

And they, long gone, live in us yet, around
the edge of night, that lost and secret race
who mastered the mastodon with its name, and found
the charm to chain the sabre-tooth's harsh grace;
who first declared the days, and with awed sounds
remarked upon the glacier's quickening pace.