Tuesday 21 June 2011

Diacritical poem

The hangman’s scaffold is a Greek letter gamma
The black-hooded grammarian pauses
before adding the diacritical mark of
a downstroke man -- or to be more precise
pauses to wait for the mark to stop shaking
to stop writhing between cedille and ogonek
All the kicking. The tilde hair
The bulging bold umlaut eyes.
He's critical of the way this one dies.
The ligature was insufficiently tight.

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