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      March 1, 2012Laurelyn WhittBunahan

      When the last speaker of Boro
      falls silent,
      who will notice
       
      the first-grown feather
      of a bird’s wing? (gansuthi)
       
      or feel how far pretending
      to love (onsay) is
       
      from loving
      for the last time (onsra)?
       
      Quiet and uneasy, in an
      unfamiliar place (asusu)
       
      no one sees her, or listens;
      there is less of her
      than there was.
       
      The last speaker feels
      Boro’s world fall apart,
       
      knowledge unravels:
      healing plants go
      unseen; the bodies of animals
       
      are unreadable.
       
      With a last thought, onguboy
      (to love it all, from the heart),
       
      she leaves fragments
      of the world she held in place.
       
      We touch their husks,
      about to speak and
      about not to speak
      (bunhan, bunahan);
       
      awash in loss,
      incomplete.

      Note:

      The italicized words are from Boro, an endangered language still spoken in parts of northern India. For more on this story, see Mark Abley’s Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages.

      from #35 - Summer 2011

      Laurelyn Whitt

      “Nearly 90% of the 7000 or so languages that are still with us will disappear, or be disappeared, before the century ends, according to linguists. With them will go knowledge and value systems, entire ways of perceiving, of living with the world. ‘Bunahan’ (‘about not to speak’) follows one endangered language into an extinction that does not have to be.”

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