At times, in those last few months,
he would think of a word
and he had to remember the tree, or the species of frog,

the sound denoted…

—John Burnside, “The Last Man to Speak Ubykh“
in @londonreview.bsky.social, August 2002
A #poem for #MotherLanguageDay
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n16/john-burnside/the-last-man-to-speak-ubykh