We attend on language. We wait for it to come.
It’s never here as early as we wish,
but we cannot justly gripe that it arrives late,
for when it gets here it gets here, and that’s on time.
It’s what’s left at communication’s sum,
about to be chopped or minced and thrown to the fish.
One of our eyes catches in it a special trait,
fit to preserve in meter and in rhyme.
We learn to attune our ear to the background hum
and attend to movement on its tympanic slate.
We temper the phonemic gong and chime.
Poetry reinvigorates a tongue gone numb
as sound and sense revive in the vocable swish.
Yes, poetry becomes language’s fate,
determined by what’s hauled up from the fishy grime.
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