The teacher strays off
about the arts, useless
at first and afterwards
there is a use

With everything it has gone
like that, with language
it is repeated
at every birth

Babies try
to link
our sweet words
and motherese

to what is happening and thus
to come from provisional
to definite meanings
Step by step it gets useful

to talk to each other
even as a stranger
to the strangers
you don't understand