Oiseau

No wonder Saint-Exupéry took to planes—
flying is easy when your words are so much 
light and helium, exhaled into vowels 
and tethered down with the odd que or un.

French speaks of flight in every syllable,
accents humming like propellers—
Not even lourde could pin down
so much as a sheet of loose-leaf.

English is more pragmatic, a toe in every camp,
prefixes like screw-on vacuum cleaner attachments,
Greek and Latin compatible, forever re-tooled
with downloadable patches and open-source updates.

The hobbyist’s perfect tongue, cobbled together
with junk swiped from some Anglo-Saxon garage,
syllables pinched in vices, bent and blowtorched
and alloyed until they can hardly mesh in rhyme.

But all that’s bound to weigh us down— 
our wings flap, we huff “bird! bird!” while French 
glides overhead, whispering oiseau,
as if such a buoyant word could ever fall to Earth.

© Justin Joschko