26 Letters

Ibn Tyne, Saudi Arabia

Twenty-six letters on parade: ubiquitous t, e, and a;
The often twinning up b, d, l, m, n, s, and p;
Common or garden c, g, j, k, o, r, and u;
Quiet h, vibrating v, inquisitive w, and shy q;
f that won’t off, x – the dictionary’s waif, and bookend z.

Twenty-six letters and all they encompass
from the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Lear, and The Tempest,
Milton’s Paradise Lost, Eliot’s Lovesong and Quartets,
Pound’s Alpine Cantos, and Orwell’s window clear prose.

Twenty-six letters working for forty-four sounds,
Fettering consonants outnumbering gushing vowels,
All articulacy forged in friction’s meeting points,
Syllables undulating strong and weak,
Dashing or dragging feet, dashing or tripping feet.

Twenty-six letters combining and grouping up
In inexhaustible permutations; flat
Workaday clarity-mark battalion paragraphs,
And adjective-rich sentence seas,
Clause after clause riding the multudinous waves.

Twenty-six letters and I stumble inarticulate,
Humming and hawing between gasps of air,
Dribbling monosyllables, no train of thought,
Locked in a disconnect between brain, tongue and throat.
Twenty-six letters leaving me in alphabet soup.

Twenty-six letters, yet they evade mastery—
The lasso lead, the unveiling cursor, the stabbing nib,
And the biro’s chain and rolling ball
Cannot restrain them any more than the failing page,
The filling page, the failing page, the filling page…