Alas, Subjunctive, I knew you well,
Yet so near I hear the quiet knell
Of an imperceptible funeral bell.
And Oxford Comma, I will miss
You clarifying curl, a sweet caress
To my eager ears, but not all hear
And I fear I am alone in my distress.
How can the rigid brick foundations
Of my communication education
Shift, I would have thought this were solid ground.
Instead, the people change the language,
And the language changes them.
Might this reflect a newfound lazy streak?
Or is it indeed open minded, as they speak
In hoarse vernacular, no sanding on the edges
The dynamic truth bared in tumbling tongues.
I have wondered how these tongues decided
To shape those sounds and with it the firm past,
To fight fleeting wars and build cultures that last,
Uniting or dividing not by swords but words,
When all along the world has changed and lived
When oblivious teenagers forget the subjunctive.
GOK- Yes! This is a great subject and approach for you. You mourn the decay of grammatical structures and the larger loss of rigor and meaning. There's a mock epic quality at the end, but really, I think you could also stay with formal language and poetic devices to make this an elegy for lost meaning. The phrase 'lazy streak' feels too casual/informal here, no?
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