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Rated: E · Poetry · Experience · #1943767
poem about word creation and star creation intertwining
Star Birth of the Word ULASSA

                                                                               shiels 5/2013

Just now,  I have in my conceit

created a brand new word, Ulassa,

at 8:05 AM: as I write,

Ulassa is like an infant star that burns white hot hydrogen and

joins—who knows—988,000 English words or more,



As a new birthed star joins our known universe of—who knows—

22 septillion other stars,

give or take a few quadrillion,



150 billion galaxies

150 billion stars

Do the math humbly,



Ulassa—

The Oxford English Dictionary will say it means

“the short sense of escape we can experience,

when something really bad has happened”,



Like, a childsister has gone missing or

we hear we may lose a foot from frostbite,

so in those short escapes from ongoing pain,



We will get ulassa,

from meditation or the bottom of

a rum cola—



Or the red coals

of a summer campfire,

the molecules of carbon

drinking oxygen,



Ulassa in the dictionaries,

will have no real etymology

for a while,



Having first breathed air only

on the morning of

May 23, 2013,



Ulassa will enter poems

and maybe yoga classes,

will become a cocktail and



An expensive perfume, eventually

a breed of cat, or surely the

name of a racehorse

even a minor crater on

the surface of the moon,



Ulassa will live for four hundred years

73 languages, give or take,

will borrow and ingest it,



Before it burns out like a star or “odd bodkin”

from Shakespeare, just remember,

It started Here, on this day



You will see.

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