Click on the Play Button below to hear my poem, “The Alphabit,” read aloud. “The Alphabit” is one of 81 poems included in my new book, The Logic of Rhyme, available on Amazon.
The Alphabit
If you would know the genuine article
Then know that the primal, the pristine particle,
May be named, on the wings of wit,
An Alphabit,
With letters that follow, and in their way,
Form the array of all DNA.
I surmise that a double helix
Is a perfect place for creativity,
The locus where A, C, G, and T
Can arrange and rearrange
In combinatorial efficacy,
Hithering and thithering
Slithering and zithering
Dancing and chancing in key
To enable risks and opportunity.
And if, an ideal place for creativity,
The helix truly in doubling verily be,
It is also never or ever quite error free
(O felix culpa! on this we can all agree)
But an arabesque by error blest, you see,
Since mistakes are portals of discovery.
Here and there and everywhere
From the arctic to ocean to equatorial
It all comes down to the combinatorial,
With this important and stunning stipulation:
Self-making is always part of the combination.
And less I lapse and leave out a hypothetical,
Underlying even that is, yes, the Alphabitical.
And so let us laud truffles and buffalo,
High mountain vistas and alpenglow,
Landscapes where trees in majesty grow
Where sequoias enjoy a height tall as thunder
And daffodils baffle quills in awe and wonder.
Where water and sunlight in plants conspire
To create and inflame a photosynthetic fire
By splitting water molecules into H+ & OH−
A polar pair that is now and ever augmentative.
O is always eau or H2O
An oracular letter, and O so fit,
To be writ by wit in Alphabit.
Let me submit the gnarly word bit
Whose etym, the PIE root *bheid,
Means to split, divide, or cleave,
And thus is one way to conceive
The many ways wherein water
Can wend, wave, wax, and weave.
And that nature, when and where and otherwise,
Can do so much by learning how to Alphabitize.
And if you wish to put it lean and deft,
The cloven, like warp and weft,
Cleft from the woven, is of binity bereft.
And so, all’s right with the world, in every quarter,
When everything’s harmonious in Alphabitical order.
Another jeu d’esprit
By yours truly, HyC