If you seek to master English,
brace your spirit, steel your breath—
for its pathways twist like ivy
on the worn, ancestral hearth.

Say rough and then say through—
then bough, then bought, then bout, then beauty.
Hear how logic bows in shame
before this mongrel tongue’s capricious duty.

A cough will rack a sailor’s ribs,
a plough will turn the farmer’s ground;
yet hough lies hidden in the books
and scarcely dares to make a sound.

A kernel sprouts within the soil,
a colonel marches dressed in might—
and isle and aisle—two silent twins—
drift moonlit through the reader’s night.

Lead may guide the pilgrim home,
but lead (the metal) sinks instead;
and read is red when time has passed,
though present tense keeps its bright thread.

If sew is so, then why is dew
not doo, as logic might decree?
And why must queue (a lonely Q)
drag four mute letters hopelessly?

A modest tear may grace the cheek,
another tear may rend the seam;
and wind will blow across the fields,
yet wind will coil within a dream.

Now ponder break beside speak,
and steak beside a thirsty leak—
where vowels masquerade as kin
yet never utter what they speak.

Then whisper sword, abandoning S,
and yacht, that Dutch intruder bold;
and choir, whose letters break their ranks
to sing a tune no rules will hold.

O pilgrim of this printed maze,
take heart—though chaos seems to reign;
for English is an ancient quilt
of conquest, grief, and human strain.

Its riddles bear the mark of time,
of tribes that wandered, fought, and clung;
and every inconsistency
is history woven into tongue.

So study well these tangled ways,
yet see their beauty, fierce and true—
for in this grand confusion lives
the soul that speaks in me and you.

:: 11.15.2025 ::