Mundus patet, verbum patet

The world lies open, the word lies open

Notes towards a Semantic Archaeology

You are dealt a hand of words, each hiding an older image. Write a poem in which every line holds at least one of them. When every line holds, let the poem bleed: the images buried in your words rise above them, along with a few you never meant to call.

Rule

Lines Hand

Your hand

Your poem

Read with the lexicon · entries drawn from canonical.json.
Contested words hold no recovered image, so they never count toward a line.

Mundus patet, “the world is open”: the Romans’ phrase for three days a year (24 August, 5 October, 8 November) when the pit called the mundus was uncovered and the dead were free to walk among the living. No battles were begun, no marriages made. Here it is the word that opens. Varro, quoted in Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.16.18; the dates from Festus.