Poem: mother tongue

[vi]

[waves hello] First time posting!dhobikikutti asked that I crosspost a poem I wrote to this community.

mother tongue

i wish for incisions to be made in language
tangled orthographic wedges excised
layers of phonological tissue grafted to form a

forked                   tongue

to speak things lost – never taught,
in the name of Your English Is So Good
concise essays
broad ‘strine telephone voice
mingling into new soil and prospect.

immerse me, i begged this year,
mum, who else can i learn it from?
but our lingua franca resurfaced
worming through fissures of disuse
we’re too used to speaking english with you.
did you know i stopped dreaming in hokkien years ago?

i would trade precision for wholeness
nasal vowels for voiced consonants
to start dreaming
to speak
to listen to you
amah, nainai,
before you too are lost to me