I was born robbed of my maternal language,
That crucial bundle of Heart’s pillars
and ribs.
The one that makes you forget
What even words or images are
worth for,
The one that shaped what sense I hold,
And the one who built me
from mere ashes
When I couldn’t even have my eyes
for God, before the first of times.
I’ve searched through more than a dozen
of them so far,
those which humans throw and throw,
force, upon me,
and each time one comes
when the victory seems at last
only for me to find
I have nothing else in my hand
than the smell of footsteps long gone
in the sand and dirt.
Though a half of my plucked out
ribs remain,
which is Poetry that ever wants me,
tongue carries,
that which cannot be
undermined nor explained,
I limp, maimed, without my own tongue
to claim.
And from that search my love though
for the language made its birth.
Possibly the yearning turned into arousal
of wonder catching, affection lapping.
I went back to the Language,
a veritable person I make of it,
I gave it the right of a name,
characteristics
And I am all those questions
directed towards it.
By the script of E.J. Koh’s letters of mother,
How to express in Korean, English,
or any other language
how we miss one dearly
or how the distance shapes itself?
How does language create us
and makes us become
what we are truly deep inside?
How does it decompose us
at our lowest and the highest,
of the state and one’s expressing?
Especially when the Word, at times,
though so futile unreliable,
is the only thing we have left,
like Dreams?
And if you ask me now,
with so much tongue inheritance
already making my stance in “To Be”,
which mortal speech the most beautiful is?
You can’t. for how can I choose?
French, the violet whisper?
Spanish, flaming blades in Llorona’s tears?
English, a parting ship in eloquent observance?
Italian, a cigarette night in a local conversation in lush green?
I cannot. For, what choice?
You could also ask me which of the stars
I love the most: I can’t say.
Each is so similar to other yet not,
though the brightest might not
be the dearest,
the middle one might not be the further one and the intimate arousal for all
that abstract and ungraspable
makes your feelings so confused
and beautifully mad
as if you had polyamory
with many persons at once,
couldn’t get rid of any of them,
choose only one,
yet each one of them has something
the other does not.
Every exchange of a language in mind
is that of our person,
even more of Poetry
I derive myself from in feelings & images,
an exchange of puzzles, schemes,
as if going through a ballroom
full of diversely dancing people
and once you have to step through them dancing waltz to pass
and then dancing tango.
The fall of the Babel was the moment
when that maternality of Speech
shattered into alien yet same
breaths, sacrifices, work of hands
and transit,
and ended up so rich
yet so lacking in its “magna carta”
So, if it all ends always as the same,
If it always leaves heart ripped,
If I can have it all yet none I want,
If it’s the same mortal thing
in codes shrouded...
If in this realm, the story ends
and starts alas,
tell me:
What choice of speak
do you even think
I still have?
A great praise, ode, heart’s shredding
I give in an ode to the language.
As a glossophile, a true priest of the Language
I came to bear and die,
My revealance of the elation and painful trail
I endure each day, each learning
And each time Polish is forced
Upon my lips.
When a mother tongue is your
“stepmother” one
and you feel constant reject
any time using it.
This is another Intimacy
of mine I share.