I have become addicted to
The gait of words on trotting feet:
da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM
And so it goes in every line.
The sound obeys the tides of tongues
And rolls before you notice how
You have a music in your mouth
Without a sign of rhyme or break.
And yet it carries on its back
The ebb and flow of reasoned thought:
And now clement, and now intense,
And all the while at steady pace.
It needs no one to know its name.
It lives and works for readers’ joy.
I know the name they write in books:
The iambic tetrameter.
Minakhi Misra 