The Oxford English Dictionary

While some struggled to return from the war,

Others found refuge in pigeonholed words,

When the occasional surcease in sleuthing

Opened a path which had a momentary end:

The way Tolkien, laboring in the W’s, brought

The magnifying glass at his eye to one walrus—

Tusked, blubbery, whale-horse athwart a floe.

In a crabbed hand, he wrote hrosshvalr,

Old English source if “zoologically improbable.”

Jamieson, keeper of the Skerries Lighthouse,

Contemporaneously reported a beast “yawning

During its sleep” and “quite tolerant of ladies.”

Fresh from no-man’s-land, the lexicographer

Dug trenches through Germanic tongues,

Having walnut behind him and warlock ahead.

And we? Waterboard. Weaponize. Worse.