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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. We pair poets with poets and they write a sequence of six new works by responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here
 

All the world as one


There must be one word
that exists in all the world’s languages
and although it means something different in each

(like in Turkish it’s an uncle
who’s not really an uncle and in Hindi
it means an ambitious driver and among the Piraha tribe

it’s a joke that gets funnier
the more times it’s told) we will unite
the people of the earth to crick back their necks and chant:

the messages will swarm
out like bats from a cave, filling the sky,
coming within a beat of each other but never colliding

and the word will push
out into space, gaining mass, until
– in a British billion years – it will reach new life forms

on a young planet.
As they watch the word approach,
a pupil dilating, they’ll be scared at first, that’s fine.

Then they’ll look
to each other, then they’ll look
to the sky, and the word will fall like snow.

All their funny noises
and hand signals will seem somehow
brittle and sad beneath the weight of that glorious sound.