Cuneiform - Poem by Brooks Haxton Published in The Atlantic
What is the five letter word Brooks Haxton refers to in the following poem?
The wedge sank five times into the clay,
and a word, which had been spoken in a breath,
lay still until the gods’ names were forgotten.
Then, when strangers took the tile in hand,
while stars sailed into the dark
beyond the world, the dead tongue
in the clay began to speak.
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Are you ever going to tell us?
I was asking a sincere question, not as a teacher, but as a student. I would truly like to know what the five letter word is. My first guess was the Hebrew word for the Covenant God, “Yhwh,” but it has only four Hebrew letters. My second guess is “Elohim,” the more common name for God, which has five Hebrew letters.
nathan.