Words in my mother tongue
Scare me.
I am drowned in a sea of familiarity,
Which suffocates and deafens me,
Like some of our mothers do.
The stories alienate me,
The phonetics estrange me,
And the great classics strut towards me,
Like confident chatters who don’t stand
Any form of interjection.
It doesn’t matter what my mother tongue is.
I could speak Hamokutinanish and shake in the same manner.
When I speak the words, they lose all the possibilities
Except for getting salt passed.
When I swim myself to the shore,
Hopping onto the dry land,
Walking uncovered for miles and miles,
Starved, thirsty,
Trembling uncontrollably due to physical weary,
And finally reaching a small puddle,
I quench my thirst with the water that looks so strange to me.
At that moment, a new language bursts out of my mouth,
And that is when I start to speak.