Weir
Weir
The boy believed that
If only he could find
And say aloud and thrice
The one, the pure word,
All that was broken in
His world would be fixed,
And so at night when
His mother thought
He was in bed he was running
His finger through
The dictionary his father
Had left behind,
With so much else,
Trusting that he’d know
The word when he saw it.
One night, when he was deep
In the alphabet, so deep
He’d begun to worry
He’d missed it,
He found it.
An old word, one
He’d never heard before.
It had to do with how
You control the flow
Of water in a river.
Kneeling, he closed his eyes
And said it three times,
And sure enough
Things did change,
But not because
He’d said the word
But because
That’s what things do.