I’ll never forget the utter despair I felt when I first heard about The Lost Words: A Spell Book, by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris. Not despair about this stunning book; despair that it was necessary at all. Written in response “to the removal of everyday nature words – among them “acorn”, “bluebell”, “kingfisher” and “wren” – from a widely used children’s dictionary,” I felt betrayed by our civilization. How could “acorn” be a word that wasn’t used frequently enough to merit inclusion in a reference book for children? Who decided that “acorn” wasn’t a word children needed to know?

If I felt despair for our language in 2017, I don’t even know where to start with my feelings in 2026. I teach middle school now, and it seems like there is a new word everyday. (Although thankfully skibidi seems to be on the way out.) I recently read Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, by Manchán Magan, which has stirred up this sorrow again. It makes me long for a language I never knew. I have ancestors from both Ireland and Scotland, (according to Magan, Irish and Scots Gaelic were identical until the 13th century) but neither of my grandmothers, the closest links to this heritage, ever spoke a word of either tongue as far as I know. I had no inkling of the richness of Irish, or the deep connection between it and both the natural and supernatural world. Magan’s thorough and thoroughly enchanting book aims to “spark little jolts inside you regarding the potency of language.” Music to a poet’s ears.

Today’s poem begins with a borrowed definition of one of the Irish words for the phases of sunrise: breacadh an lae, or “brightening of the day.”

At the brightening of the day
the diurnal world begins to stir.
A magical wave of birdsong
pierces the darkness,
tickling our subconscious,
luring us back into the waking world,
dazzling us with its radiance.

Draft, © Catherine Flynn, 2026

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