Tongues

Some languages are fluently translatable
but only by how the mouth
utters and shapes them,
they are too musical to be not sung,
like Gaelic; it was my mother’s tongue
and her grandmother’s elder tongue.

Romani is acoustically spell-binding,
Grandfather was a gypsy
horses naturally understood his voice;
it’s an Indo-Aryan root language
like Yiddish, a colloquial melodia
in Ashkenazi/Aramaic.

My own genetically challenged branch
of a familial tree of tongues
is half-Jewish  – the wrong half.

These lips follow only English,
a language with too many roots,
its tongues are all blended into
a raucous silence.
There are many multilingual wounds
and they all bleed like dark treacle
out of a hide-bound dictionary.

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