Wednesday 28 August 2019

Fort


Ah, here we go again:
the bleedin’, blindingly, bloody obvious
etymology of a word

falling out of its invisible box,
revealing itself shamelessly
without so much as an OED.

‘Ta-da! What took you so long, by the way?’
it laughs, good-naturedly,
while I resort to the slapping of a forehead (mine),
astonished at my
s  l  o  w  n  e  s  s.

I question the audacity of calling myself ‘poet’.
Pnnfff! Poet?
Do you even know what that means?
(Checks Dictionary of Etymology;
reframes answer as, ‘Yes’;
inwardly adds, ‘At least, I do now.’)

‘Le Chateau Fort,’ Gemma said,
leafing through a tourist leaflet.
(Can you leaf through a leaflet?
Perhaps I’d better check.)
‘The strong Chateau.’

‘Like a fort,’ I add,
looking around to see if there’s an Alleluia chorus
to mark the before/after border
between linguistic darkness and light.

Fort. Strong. Of course!

Forte. Fortissimo. Fortitude.
Fortress (now considering if this is a female fort).
How could fort’s true meaning
have stayed hidden for so long?

And every time this happens, I wonder:
how many more times?;
how many more words?

Words are stones, I think, getting all poety again,
and sometimes we need an OED
to crack them open; to reveal their hidden fossils.

Other times, there the fossils are, for everyone to see:
as obvious as a strong on top of a hill.

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