Speak To Me In a Language I Can Hear

This line from The Smashing Pumpkins song Thirty-Three has always had a strange ressonance with me. It grabs for me the idea that even though we may be able to listen to a language we may not always hear it. I remember one experience I had when I visited the USA for the first time.
I'd arrived early for the conference I was attending and met with some other attendees to have dinner. I was the only Australian, and as we sat for our meal, even thought the other 5-6 people were all speaking English, I could listen, but I couldn't hear. There was just too much context around the words they were using that didn't overlap with my experiences for me to be able to really decipher what was being said.

As I look back now to the #Word2017 I set myself to write a poem a week based on a word suggeested by someone else, I think this idea captures this project in it's essence. From my context I would take a single word suggested by someone else, and do my best to capture it. I'm sure I missed aligning with their context more than once. But maybe somewhere in this, is the connection to the idea that people have meanings. Not words. (Check out Words, Meanings and People by Dr. SI Berman for more on this.)

So here is speak to me in a language i can hear

Download speak to me in a language I can hear PDF Version (~20MB)