undertones

up the line from maginot [search “maginot line”]

no & what or nyet & shto [english or russian]

diploid/diptych bun/chignon [twofolds and hair arrays]

exoskeleton & bone [body frames outer and inner]

rigor mortis/combat zones [telltales of death in progress]

What are undertones? For the sake of this texted image, they are hard-to-hear hints of more than meets the obvious notice. One must pay focused attention to receive the hint, and then one must decrypt it. (“Decrypt? As in exhume?” he said in an undertone.)

This is a fear-of-war poem/image/post. The endword “tones” led me to muse about words ending with t that had a long-o last-syllable pronunciation. I was also mindful of previous use of such words or phrases (remembering, for instance, that I’d used “à bientôt” before) because I don’t like relying too heavily on the same words and phrases to solve the rhyme. Suddenly “Maginot” occurred to me, and a floodgate opened.

The Maginot Line was a barrier erected by the French to save their homeland from invasion, thought to be impregnable. It proved to be not much of a problem for the invading Nazis. Flash forward eighty years, and here in the United States of America, there is advocacy for the expending of resources for a barrier to save the homeland from invasion. It seems as though history’s lessons, though not undertoned, sometimes go unheeded.

That’s how the poem got started. Consider the rest of the message of the poem as a muttered warning. You will need an ear for subtlety to hear and correctly interpret the rest of the message. But you need not work so hard if you wish to simply enjoy an attempt at wordplay through juxtaposition, meter and rhyme.