It's 1985 and linguistics professor emeritus is teaching us
About the Great Vowel Shift
And other things that made English
Our language that it is today.
We read along as he recites
The Lord's Prayer in Old English
And as he demonstrates how to pronounce Chaucer's Tales properly.

He suddenly breaks off in a diatribe
About anorexia nervosa, and how it killed Karen Carpenter.
And then he stops, looks directly into the camera of my lens
And says, "Why Karen? Why?
We loved you just as you were
And didn't care, whatever your weight was----
A voice of an angel, gone!"

And then I realized, he wasn't a genius, or a great learned sage,
He was just another old man
Who didn't understand anything
About the pressure to be thin in the 1980's.

-jenn