I am fascinated by origins. How did speech develop, why did it develop was must it have felt like to speak the first word? In about 4000 BCE someone in Sumer invented writing possible to aid in stocktaking of food and temple offerings. Here I read my poem and the music is Satie’s Gymnopodie No 1 played by Special Edition with Graham Pike on flugel horn and Harmonica.
There is a long musical interval in the middle of the poem but I wanted to use the whole track.
In the Beginning
It must have been wonderful,
the first word, the first “I love you”,
the starburst of colour,
ritual and fine, flint knives.
Then, for two hundred millennia,
they had hung in the air,
until one day, pressed into damp clay,
they were pinned by a reed to cuneiform.
The Poet wrote:
He put his hand in her hand
he put his hand to her heart
sweet is the sleep of head to head
sweeter the sleep of heart to heart
and I read those of those of Inanna,
goddess of Love and war,
five thousand years after
She had commanded her lover:
“In battle I am your leader,
in combat your armour bearer.”
My fingers trace them today,
words in sun-hardened clay.
The Poet and Inanna
will never die.
© Anthony Fisher March 2013