"Ode on Punctuation" [by David Lehman]

A poem without punctuation is female. – Pauline Ambrozy

The comma is female,
The exclamation point male,
The semi-colon is fem bi-curious sub 29 Virginia.

The apostrophe is prosperous, possessive (femme)
The colon looks both ways before crossing the street (m).
The fast-running dash can’t make up his mind
about the curvaceous question mark lurking in the lobby. What to do?
The parenthesis (f, 30) needs attention and keeps interrupting.

Thus the sentence moves
from the solace of day
to the lunacy of night
in a dependent clause beginning “although.”

Although it is past curfew,
the nouns in the woods
conjugate the verbs
unattended by adjectives and adverbs.

And the sentence drives to a climax
and ends in a classic final male full stop.

-- David Lehman

Comments

[Laura Orem]

This explains a lot of my students' papers.

[Terence Winch]

I: love it!.