People ask me,
"Were you born here?"
And I want to say I was,
But this slight of my tongue,
This twist of speech betrays me.
A native loved one tells me,
When he sees the consternation
And despair plain on my face,
That it's only a lilt, not crippling, per se.
But how do I belong here
If I speak with the voice of there?
How do I pause the motion of this accursed pen
And set it scribbling instead from right to left?
I laugh with them when they hear the way I say a word
And I try to say it the way that they do,
But my "ah"s are too drawn, my "l"s too conspicuous,
My "r"s are not deep enough, my "t"s are too reptilian,
Slippery like the tears I'd shed when they told me
I was writing my name wrong.
I knew no other place, and here I learned to hate,
But lately, for the past 5 years or so,
I've been ashamed of the thing that brands me-
אמריקאית, Amerika'it, American.