I have so little French
in my vocabulary—
a soupçon, one might say—

which has nothing to do
with soup—a word wearing
such a graceful accent mark,

the cedilla that softens that
“c” almost into an “s.” But
when that little bit of a

word alights before me,
I imagine diving into
a sea of diacritical marks

of languages I don’t speak
simply because I like the look
of the diminutive accents:

the graceful swoosh of the tilde, ˜
the definitive paired overdots ¨
of the umlaut,

and oh, the tittle, that teeny dot
over a small i. There are many
more of their brethren who

bear lovely names: circumflex,
acute and grave accents, the breve,
the over-ring over an A used

by Norwegians, Danes and
Swedes. They summon images
of places I may never see,

or ones I have—especially
the ʻokina in Hawaiʻi
and macron in kahakō.

And there I am, happily
swimming in punctuation,
appreciating this vast

word ocean that, like fish,
we may not be aware of,
but one that eons of ancestors

have given us—we, the peoples
of the world, whose languages
swirl sweet music into my

thirsty ears.