Taom - a favourite poem

The unexpected tide,
the great wave,
uncontained,
breasts the rock,
overwhelms the heart,
in spring
or winter.
Surfacing from a fading language,
the word comes when needed.
A dark sound surges and ebbs,
its accuracy steadying the heart.
Certain kernels of sound
reverberate like seasoned timber,
unmuted truths of a people's winters,
stirrings of a thousand different springs.
There are small unassailable words
that diminish caesars,
territories of the voice
that intimate across death and generation
how a secret was imparted,
that first articulation,
when the vowel was caught
between a strong and a tender consonant,
when someone, in anguish,
made a green and mortal sound
that lived until now,
a testimony
to waves succumbed to
and survived.
---Moya Cannon