while what you have swallowed has not caught up with your spirit
a race of people happening by long bottled letters
have surrounded them by dry quotations
that blow away easily to make room for the new naive
whichever discourses had been thought precious become only stones
an unacquainted stranger that the mortal rivers pass
beyond the long forgotten that had preached while they had lived
and opening its mouth wide into a sea of names
the last of its memories discarded onto shores by tides
for us to gather and collect them and hold them close