WEBVTT

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And this is another but
much shorter catalog.

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This one is called
"The Word Water."

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And it's one poem
out of a sequence

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of poems called
"Talking To Helen,"

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Helen being Helen Keller.

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And in this sequence of
poems, what I was trying to do

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was imagining that I was
explaining the meaning of words

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to someone who could
neither hear nor see,

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using tactile images.

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"The Word Water. "
And water, of course,

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was the first word that
Helen understood as a word,

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as language.

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It was from that word that
the whole idea that language--

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that everything had a
name, and the world was

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made up out of language, and
world could be understood

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through language, came to her
with that initial word water.

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The word water, meaning
what leaps on your hands,

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under the pump, but crawls down
your back from the washcloth.

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What runs down your
cheeks and tastes salty.

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What licks your feet
in the early morning

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grass with spits out
smooth rocks and lets

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you fly like a fish.

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What coaxes green from
black and brown seeds.

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Helen, try to imagine green.

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What has one home in the
sky, another in the Earth?

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What will teach you the word
deep, and the word cleanse,

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the word flow, and the word
drown, the word inexhaustible,

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and the word birth?

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What is beginning to
quench your thirst,

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for the real name of the world?

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