The Native Tongue

The Native Tongue

(“If God calls something permissible and clean, you must not call it forbidden and dirty!” Acts 10:15)

Scratched beneath the surface of that papyrus
were more ink stains than suspected. Did they
exist before the words were recorded;
did the mean anything for us?

Smoky air imitated fog all morning,
wildfires blazed a dozen miles from here.
Breathing was not optional,
and outside the soot settled on late summer
windshields.

Cantilevered like bridge-work, the tiny sentences
were sandwiched between famously old and
nouveau linguistics. For the life of me
I could not decipher the language.

I think it was Vietnamese. The ladies in the
salon
mentioned my name with ease. I appreciated the
English.
But they natively conversed with each other;
they did not interpret their private conversation.
I saw a patron, red in the face,
whisper that they should have learned our national tongue.
I did not know we had one.

I wonder what language they spoke on this continent
two millennia ago. I wonder who patrolled the streets
listening for unconscious violations of the law.
We lack what we offer, and we offer so very little,
we wonder why they aren’t just like us. We wait
for a conversation we can understand, and, until then,
demand our words become the native tongue.

But the aboriginal conversation only shows us the
mirror, our bespoke reflection underneath the moon.
Take a moment, erase the lines, substitute the commas
with a breath to fill the space. We are not so
different, our languages merely vibrations pushing air.
We live in the fusion of traditions we have forgotten,
the motion of the waves
takes us toward the shore; the patter of
childlike chatter can elicit a smile again.