David Wagoner

Two Poems

Our Choice of Words

In all languages studied to date, the word for “good”
appears five times more often than the word for “bad.”
“Long” and “tall” occur far more frequently than “short,”
“many” than “few,” “deep” than “shallow,” “wide” than
“narrow.”  What do we make of these facts?
                                    John E. Pfeiffer, The Emergence of Man

In very many good, long, deep, wide ways
we keep smiling and praying and pretending,
keep bragging and magnifying and stretching and going to great lengths
to advertise what we desire or hope to get rid of,
and maybe we think as little as possible
of one short, shallow, narrow, very bad place.

 

 

 

 

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