Oral Tradition
My mother mutters over dishes clinking in the kitchen
In eloquent elegance of interlocking iambic ideation
Spooling sounds of syllables into subtle symphonies
Breathing brilliance into bubbles broiling beneath
A staccato strophe, repeated on rolls and reams
Of sore and sorrow-saturated skin beginning to sag
Etched in edges whose eternal ends enclosed me
Passing and pressing perfections in pentameter
Linguistic legacy without literacy, long lost but beloved
Odes entirely oratory outlasting the death of a dialect
The hallows of a history hidden in hope of handing
Proud poetic prowess of patriarchs, whose power
Crashed and was crushed by colonizers’ conquest
Reduced residues of rhymes recited to me as rubble
Endowment of epics eradicated, eviscerated by English
Lords who illegalized this lyrical language now lost
But breathing. Brittle bits of beauty bequeathed
To me, the mumbling mutterer mimicking my mother
Preserving poetry imperfectly, paraphrasing
The tangled, untranslated tendrils of tediously twisted
Sounds unspooling in a streaming slide of syllables
In eloquent elegance of interlocking iambic ideation
My mother mutters over dishes clinking in the kitchen.