language please in poetry

language shapes meaning
while efforting to approximate
we will never be exact
we can never be perfect
but damn it we try our best
to get within a rounding error
of our deepest meaning
but we can’t expect it
to ever quite be there

for example every language
imagines the onomatopoeia
of the cat and dog sounds
they hear differently
yet they all work
every one of them
sounds like the sound
when an American hears a cat
we say “meow”
when the Japanese hear a cat
they say “nyan”
the thing of it is both are right
the same rough sound can be heard
as a million different words
so listen to your cat tonight
step outside your language
hear it make its sounds
imagine a new way
of heard it

on the topic of animal and man
we people get hands
instead of fangs or claws
trading weakness for
flexible potential above all
instead of biting and gouging
we get to be read and heard
I feel the same way about words

I’ll try not to whine
I’ll try not to cuss
but in the realm of linguistics
it’s like a Yakov Smirnov inversion
words shape us
words shape us
words shape us