Issue 2:2 | Featured Artist | Thomas Rain Crowe

 

The Thief of Words

Thomas Rain Crowe

 

“I am always hunting words. Tracking them down. I steal them from wherever I find them. Yes, I am a thief of words.” -Eduardo Galeano

 

 

Somewhere

there is an old man or woman

who sits in a field

or at a table

and thinks original thoughts.

The thoughts they think

are heard by someone

who is also in the field or

at the other end of the table

which is long and out of sight.

The original thoughts go in the ear

of the one listening and are taken home.

Stolen, like the sleight-of-hand of ears,

The next day the thief tells what he has heard

to his friend who is a sweeper of streets.

The sweeper pretends not to notice

or hear

the words as they fall from the mouth of the

friend talking, but takes them home with him

where they enhance his sleep.

In his dreams he passes the oracle on

to a mermaid to whom he is making love

who the next day passes it on

in the sound of wind and waves

to Hemingway’s old man thinks he is hearing

voices of angels and

writes down the liturgy

the moment he gets home on an old paper sack,

and he tells his wife who works for

the parson scrubbing the rectory floors.

The parson hears her singing

what sound like sacred hymns that

have been set to the music of her voice

and he takes them from her lips and

slips them into the sermon he

has been trying to write all day.

 

On Sunday, the original words are

heard by every Lutheran in town

and are taken home and repeated

at dinner to a thousand children,

One of the children hears this
(because none of the others are listening)

and takes one of the words she likes

and begins writing a poem.

It is a poem about the thing

about speech that is almost as good

as silence, and so said.

It is a poem about love.

She thinks she is thinking these

things for the first time.

And she is excited by the

sound of her pen on the white page.

The next day the young poet

gives her poem to her boyfriend

who reads it and later throws it away.

His father, the sheriff, finds the

piece of paper in the trash and reads it.

He thinks it is subversive

and written by an enemy of the State.

The poet’s name is on the paper

and the next day soldiers go to her house,

arrest her, and take her to jail.

 

In her trial, she is accused of

stealing original thoughts from

the old man or woman in the field

or at the long table in town.

The girl tells the judge the truth

and pleads her case eloquently

as only a poet could.

But it does no good.

The judge cannot believe that

a young girl could have thought up

these precious words by herself

and finds her guilty of

“stealing words.”

She is sent back to jail

where she is sentenced to

life in prison, and to

the dreary work of editing the truth

from the Book of Laws.

 

This is how the story ends:

The girl will die an old woman

writing love poems in the blank pages

at the end of the books she is

working on for the judge.

A hundred years later

Someone somewhere

will find the writing in the back of the books.

Will collect all the poems scribbled

on all those brown pages

and sell them to a publisher

as an original book of poems.

All the old books of laws

missing the truth

will be burned and

the published poet will travel

around the country reading her poems

to large cheering crowds.

The critics will call her “a genius.”
And rich young men will send her flowers.

This story will be repeated

over and over

for a thousand years.

A handful of poets

made immortal in print, or

as the singers of songs:

writing the same lines.

All originals.

Convicted felons.

Poets.

The thieves of words.