The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Don Colburn

Prosody


Me neither. The very word
smacks of a room for memorizing
which Latin verbs take the dative.
No one told me it’s a vibe
right there in the eardrum beat
of all words, their stresses and strains
against the other ones nearby
and silences between.
You can hear it through a wall
or in Swahili, Malayalam, Czech,
any language you don’t speak.
But dactyl? Trochee? Anapest?
I lose them like the scientific names
of clouds—all part of the sky
when weather happens.
Put down the glossary and listen.
Let a pattern discover itself
unnamed. You might not notice
until it’s broken by surprise.



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