bairnsidhe

Words change.

Words change their meaning.

What Awful once meant was Full of Awe

Inspiring and amazing and wondrous.

Words change.

Languages change.

Common slang becomes uncommon and esoteric

And what once meant one thing can now mean something

Beyond any scope of what was intended by the first lips

To speak that word or phrase.

Words change.

Languages change.

Cultures change.

What was common but inconvenient can be

Repainted as vile and sinful and wrong, demonized.

What once was hated and feared and rejected out of hand

Can be accepted by a later people, welcomed home

With open arms and flying colors declaring love.

Words change.

Languages change.

Cultures change.

People don’t.

People are bright fires of candles and the wrath of a storm

They are the beauty of flowers blooming in a glass house

Or hiding, ready to burst out in a moment’s warmth, for now

Surrounded by freezing snow and killing winds shrieking.

People must be watched like flame and respected like storms.

Because if you do not listen when they cry out for warmth

You will kill that fragile bloom.

So words change,

And languages change,

And cultures change.

And people cry out the names they want to be called

Fights don’t change.

And every false-hearted ally of a long war

Joining at that last moment to receive the laurels and not the scars

To bear the red of ribbons not of blood,

Will use the argument of words and languages and cultures shifting

To claim their prizes over our dead

And we; the buried flowers of snow, howl like wind and burn like flame.

We will be called what we will.

We will take the names we find fitting to our statures and our souls.

We will do this whether or not

You decide we deserve it and we will always fight back against your attempt

To keep our reclaimed arrows

For the quivers of those who cruelly shot us down with them in the first place.

And our cry will echo the same

That is not a slur it is my name!