A Poem

At the grocery store now
I hear a new language
While shopping for Banquets
I’m languid, I anguish
Not because of the newly formed
Nation’s striations
But where I find strangeness
This side of invasion

You see
My language is of Anglo-Saxons
Which is ultimately of Germanic extraction
And it sailed
Across the Atlantic
Seeking the, as of yet
Still undiscovered northwestern passage

To be clear, when John Smith
And John Adams and a bunch of
Puritan pilgrims landed
Spanish and Italians had already
Began to speak in Latin,
Grecian and half Latin
To be distinct
Castilian mashed with speech
Nahuatl which was uniquely Aztec

Vulgar Latin not being vulgar,
Became that Romance language
Not named for being romantic
Formally in speech today we speak as Spanish
Through the 16th and 17th century
Following the sequence which happened immediately after
And more did the language transform
Due to the American Civil War
And factors of rapid Westward-leaning expansion

Believe that I’d bely my tribe
With diatribe that’s prudely didactic
Tan skin like those the natives had to inhabit
But when he spake
In flashes came loyalty to a race
From a far flung reach of the planet
They perceived it as madness
Same same
In my own domestic setting
That flagrant disorientation sets in
And then resentment sets in
Fleeting questions set in
That’s the English in me
The trace of which
Was present in the settlement
Begins to peak and flex
It’s strange ‘cause this is Christendom
The vast cultural underpinnings peak by way of shrieking flecks
Demanding you respond in equal measure
As clearly and as civilly as you can see to it fit
Keep both your knees bent
Genuflect
Their tonal modalities inflect
Their peninsular derivative
Coating their tribal ease of defense
Forgoing all proper deeds and pretense
Transferring ownership through swiftly-executed decrees of writ
In them I see the Indian
That Colombian vision
As if wearing a cheap veneer of the flesh
Their dry, chopped syllables
Hazy, a puff of cloud
Like smoking the peace of calumet
Before the teepees were set
For elder leaders to rest
My English eye interprets but
It can’t understand
Imagining clandestine meetings as being met
Before town halls were called
By men the likes of William Penn
A completely, conducted-differently, theme of event
Though we lack any documents
To corroborate or believe what’s alleged

I dare not say I feel like a foreigner in my own land
Just genuinely estranged from my own countryman
Because suppose there was a foreign invasion encroachment event
Yelling instructions, I would be met
With that same indigenous incredulous bent
Throw a rifle at him
As though he’s supposed to defend
Then I wonder what he’d do-
Would he take my own life
A differently motivated man?
Or would he see a separation of two invasions
Using cunning non-verbal cues to persuade him
I’m not whom he need take his aim at
How great the chasm and divide
The simple task of seeking arrangements
When different is the speaking of language

I wonder if his brow would furrow then
From savagery repressed
And finally awakening
Ancestral regret seeking revenge on debts à la raison d’être
A million colonial secrets previously kept
Evils perpetrated to reach the goal of achievement, those bathed in their own conquest-seeking intents
Footprints through the blood, ran-off the bodies of other peoples,
Not spared dignity left to publicly decompose
Determinations
Machinations made under a distinctly European patchwork of ethos
Seen through a Catholic keyhole

Even the Spanish in him
Would have been guilty of adapting
Roman practices at Catholic cathedrals
I see him whispering the sign of the cross
But in muffled speech codes
One disgruntled mimicry shows

So whose language, being learned by whom, would belong to he who’d need it the most?
Who begins the imitation and who sets what precedes the procedural?
Who needs to assimilate?
To me the question is so simple with ease it becomes deceitful.

My blank face as to say here’s where the geography’s drawn
Who crossed into the border of the other
Hurdling across the processing depot

The sterile hum of the bureaucracy drone,
Assessing fees, making sure all her filings are in keeping with code
While he was kept patiently-waiting, needling, eager teeming with outwardly-seeping hope
Eventually he would have piled into a van that drove him from near the edge of the Rio
Deeper across the continental connected hierarchical tree proceeding to roads
Getting close, the lanes appearing to grow, accommodating troves of equally ambitious, newly-resourceful people the deeper in he goes
A silent sigh of victory he breathes in slow
The shuttle tires grind, screech to a halt

To experience his rendezvous with destiny,
To borrow from the famous Regan quote
God surely having given rest to his ghost

The man, feeling a new refreshment from the trip to his soul, he’s careening to go
His fated day had arrived,
His time to step before, and deliberately speak his note into the anglophone receiving hole
The one sought after with such his, the desperate clinging to hope,
But then, upon opening his mouth
Suddenly, it’s immediately known
The absurdity holds
For anyone expecting
English to be the language he spoke
There’s such a dangerous naïveté that steeps in that joke