LETTERS & LINES: Twenty-six on 20

Poetry is not my usual medium, but sometimes a prompt will inspire me to write in that form. 

Below is a piece sparked by a contest; the challenge was to write a poem in 20 lines focused on loss. 

The 20-line constraint got me thinking about other number-defined things and, somehow, the alphabet came to mind — 26 letters. Hmmmm, I pondered: How about a poem in 20 lines about 26 letters. OK, I said to myself, I'll give it a go. 

The content evolved as I wrote, with me not knowing at line 1 where I would end up at line 20; all I knew was that, somehow, I needed to make the 26 letters of the English alphabet the focus woven around the idea of 'loss'. And do this on 20 lines. (How long is a line? What do the contest creators mean by 'line'? I don't know and I didn't let that bother me.) 

The result is below. I'll let you be the judge of it... All I know is that, even though I missed the contest deadline, I had fun playing with my idea in this form, and my writing group pals enjoyed my reading of the poem to them at last month's session.

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Listen to me read the poem on Soundcloud

LETTERS & LINES: Twenty-six on 20

1. Twenty-six. The perfect number, they said.
2. Not too many, not too few.
3. Just right, they said, to say something — everything — in the English language. 
4. Vowels + consonants = words that shape meaning into stories.
5. But one day the S disappeared, with A and E following soon thereafter. 
6. Why stay, they said, when the best-shaped letter was gone.
7. At which point the Z, the Y, the X stood up and left, too, their feelings hurt, for THEY were the best-shaped letters, no?
8. The O was outraged, the P spluttered, the Q was querulous and, before the G and H and M knew it, they were all joining the exodus from the 26-letter line. 
9. That left but 14 of the originals remaining, wondering what to do, how to manage themselves in view of this lettered insurrection to the natural order of TWENTY-SIX. 
10. As if joined by some alphabetical force, suddenly, the I and the U realized they alone remained of that all important sub-group: THE VOWELS — and that precious little could be said without them. 
11. So, I and U about faced and scuttled off leaving an even dozen of lowly consonants to settle in their dust. 
12. Stoic they were, but knowing, too, that vowel-less they were helpless, hapless, hopeless. 
13. No words could they build, not even on a Scrabble board. 
14. The remaindered letters grouped themselves by shape.
15. B, C, D, J and R joined forces as ‘the curved ones’, and rolled right out of line. 
16. F and L and T stood straight and firm.
17. K and N and V and W then looked at each other.
18. Finally, W said: “We are the angled ones, the last ones here — the chosen ones. 
19. “We are stronger than mere uprights for our angles give us strength.”
20. These 20 lines of nonsense prove nothing but that playing with constraint is fun when twenty-six letters are your playmates. 

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.