By Julie Allyn Johnson
Unruly braids paisley-green pinafore
all of five years old —
I’m the personification of focus
as Miss Garnett wearing smoke-gray
horn rim glasses,
sunlight bouncing off ice-blue
rhinestones, astonishes me.
This is the shape of the letter M.
In pink chalk, she draws it out,
phoneticizes its reverberation: Emmmmmm….
She points to its mascots,
impish mice, upper case/lower case
crudely cut from cardstock —
twitchy whiskers, long curly tails —
in line with twenty-five other
sound-pairs in a letter train
circling round & round the classroom.
Jiffy-Pop sparks
cram my cranial headspace,
detonations of imparted data,
bursts of eureka: impacts to alter the course
of my history.
Twenty-six powerful revelations:
sounds have a name,
a symbol,
an identifier letters.
LETTERS!
Letters form words.
Words convey ideas.
Ideas translate to images.
Images fuel inspiration.
Energy, melody, enchantment,
conduits all, to a fluid, amazing
beautiful world.
Kindergarten thunderbolt.
And still the mighty skies
rain down lingual magic.