A Museum Inside Our Heads

A prose poem experiment using lines from Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger.

from Moon Tiger
by Penelope Lively

We open our mouths
and out flow words
whose ancestries we do not even know.

We are walking lexicons.

In a single sentence of idle chatter
we preserve Latin,
Anglo-Saxon,
Norse:

we carry a museum inside our heads,

each day
we commemorate peoples
of whom we have
never
heard.