verbs that move mountains

Courtesy of wintercreek, who (as always) has the best taste in poetry. I posted an Ingrid de Kok poem last year, and I kind of love her. This one gets under my skin.

Some stories don't want to be told.

They walk away, carrying their suitcases

held together with grey string.

Look at their disappearing curved spines.

Hunch-backs. Harmed ones. Hold-alls.

Some stories refuse to be danced or mimed,

drop their scuffed canes

and clattering tap-shoes,

erase their traces in nursery rhymes

or ancient games like blind man's buff.

And at this stained place words

are scraped from resinous tongues,

wrung like washing, hung on the lines

of courtroom and confessional,

transposed into the dialect of record.

Why still believe stories can rise

with wings, on currents, as silver flares,

levitate unweighted by stones,

begin in pain and move towards grace,

aerating history with recovered breath?

Why still imagine whole words, whole worlds:

the flame splutter of consonants,

deep sea-anemone vowels,

birth-cable syntax, rhymes that start in the heart,
and verbs, verbs that move mountains?

—Ingrid de Kok (b. 1951), "Parts of Speech," from Terrestrial Things (Cape Town: Kwela/Snail, 2002).