Changing Unchanging

[bairnsidhe]

 This was purchased by chanter_greenie from my Queer Writing June '17.

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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!

Comments

[chanter1944]

Oh my goodness, this is beautiful and poignant.

[bairnsidhe]

Thank you! I quite liked writing it. The way words can shift has always been a very hopeful thing for me, which is exactly why I felt the need to defend my labels.

[technoshaman]

People do change. Sometimes radically. But it takes something major to do it. A death, a divorce, a realisation that oneself, or one's world, isn't as it appeared to be...

A musical friend just filed for divorce. She'd been fairly quiet except on stage, very much in a shell... well, she posts that she's filed, and the next thing I know, she's got a big ol' green man tattoo (her first), she's plotting multiple international trips, yelling at contractors and estate agents, generally being a Force of Nature...

Or me. No s---, there I was, shy of 21, a goody-two-shoes sunday-go-to-meetin-perfect-attendance type, didn't cuss, didn't f***, didn't drink much.... and then my best friend came out of the closet.

Eighteen months later? Happy little heathern, doin' the deed in the woods, swearing like a sailor, Sunday mornings are for sleeping in after Saturday night's revels...

Still don't drink much. And, which may be what you're getting at, still think that the basic qualification for being a good person is giving a damn about one's fellow sentient. *That* hasn't changed.

I totally agree that words have power, too, and that it's up to us to claim it.

[bairnsidhe]

I meant less the idea that an individual person doesn't change and more the idea that people, the dumb panicky animals, don't generally change. Over the eons you'll see the same general types of people over and over again because the universe is lazy. The cultures that reward or punish people for being how they are can shift to be kinder, but you'll still have a mix of jerks and targets and people trying to keep their head down and go with the flow.

Thanks for reading!

[technoshaman]

*laughter* dumb, panicky DANGEROUS animals, and you know it! ;) (What's meta-funny about that movie is you got a big Spanish-speaking gringo from San'Tone and this skinny black rapper kid from Philly.... doin' a buddy-cop movie, only with space aliens. :)

You're right.

There will ALWAYS be assholes. And there will always be a helluva lot of people just trying to survive.

And there will always, we hope, be one or two or ten or twenty people with real problems with traditional authority who end up changing - or saving, or both - the world...

I just wish they'd hurry up and show up...

I also wish, 'cause if one is wishing, go big!, that they'd turn out to be a poet or a rapper or a singer or somebody else (Vaclav Havel, anyone?) with a way with *words*...

I'd ask for Lin-Manuel, but Vanessa would never let him do it. I don't blame her.