The British newspaper The Guardian rang in the new year with the poem “Words Were Changing,” by first-year writing faculty Miller Oberman. The poem, featured in the “Poem of the Week” column, appears in Miller’s new book, The Unstill Ones. Here’s a little snippet from Carol Rumens’s column.

In this week’s poem, hearing himself say the word welcome in the casually polite idiom, “you’re welcome”, the speaker finds it has “spun back to what it meant, / before”. The word reverts to a psychologically richer meaning. How far back “before” takes us is the crucial question.

The poem can be found at The Guardian.