Words

When I began writing this song I don’t know whether I knew, or didn’t, that it would be my last song, but by the time I reached the end of it I did.

Words, when you stop to think about it, are amazing things. Language is an amazing thing. Too amazing, in my view, for an infant to learn just by being talked at for a few years by swiftly moving grown-ups.

In fact, I believe that as young children we’re simply being reminded. It is simply too fantastic that by hearing language for a while we absorb not only words and their meanings but the gender of things, the inflection of verbs, the cases of things, tenses of things, the whole complex universe called grammar.

In Swedish, for example, the definite article “the” is added to the noun as a suffix, either as –en, or as –et, depending on the “gender” of the noun.  Now, there’s no rhyme or reason to which nouns take –en and which nouns take –et as their definite article. None. Still, hearing language for a while, the child just knows. And that’s Swedish. I’m not even going near German. Or, Heaven forbid, Finnish.

Language has deeper roots somewhere within us than infantile memory, of that I am sure.

That said. “Words” struck as an apt way of telling who I am, what I do, and how I come to you. Not only that, it is also how I see and know.

In many ways, my songs are my eyes, my ears, my heart. And when I stop singing, I know I am done here.

The Words:

Here is what I am
Here is what I do
Here is how I come
to you

Here is how I see
Here is how I know
Here is what I tend
and grow

Here they rise anew
feathered and true
words to find and view
what I dream into
another sky to sky
to see me through

Voices on the wing
and laughter on the wave
Light upon the night
they brave

Here is where I live
Here is where I’ll stay
Here is where I cease
and fade away

Ulf Wolf
Fall 2004/Spring 2014
Copyright © 2018

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