Along the paths of echo backwards.
There the words lie in the chest of their old meanings.
But, sad, so foreign. What is it they are saying, those lips.
They speak of different connections and conditions.
As you listen to them speaking
they form a thing that is also changed by them
spell in a language even farther removed
in still another of the chests
inside the mount of the seven chests
thousands and thousands of years before Babylon.

- Poem by Swedish poet, Harry Martinson, born today in 1904. Martinson was awarded a joint Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 “for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos.”