Learning How to Speak

Words used to be for speaking, for making people listen

They used to be for painting, for making people feel

But black ink changed everything, syllables became curt and short

A cadence of sound now falls in rhythms and patterns and absurd stops and starts

It defies description and regulation--punctuation and expectation

Words that were not sentences...

And yet made perfect sense

e. e. cummings wrote with brokenness, flaunting convention

Frost turned the world around with conflict and disillusionment 

Stevens wrote with imagination and captured the universe

Williams painted the world the color of wheelbarrows

Words were now for sounds, for seeing and hearing

For describing things you couldn't see or hear

For balancing the world on the shape of a triangle

Black ink and scribbles had become ideasandthoughts...andbeings

And so the poor child scribbling in the dirt

Learned to readandwrite and sing

Learned punctuation and, grammar

And finally learned how to speak