How lonely it must have been
at the end there
when it was just a few of them
all bilingual by that point
and none of them young
but regardless a few
who could still shape a sentence
in their secret language –
a tongue which had survived
at least one ice age
before dying, as speech does
in the west
on some rocky shoreline
leaving behind only
a word meaning crab
and maybe another
for salmon, another
for lobster, another
for periwinkle
and perhaps not even those.