The House of my Tongue

The house of my tongue is a quiet house.
Its windows are shuttered with foreign words,
its doors, once thrown wide for the morning news,
now groan on their hinges, swollen and strange.

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I dream in a language I cannot speak,
a river of sound I can no longer ford.
The idioms my mother poured like tea
now sits as a fading taste.

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I hold a word, a heavy stone,
smooth in my palm, but I’ve lost its weight.
I try to build a sentence, a bridge of bones,
but the joints crack, and I’m left with the dust.

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My mouth is a museum of forgotten things.
On the walls, the echoes of a lullaby.
In the center, a glass case, empty and clean,
where the heart of my mother tongue used to beat.

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I am a cartographer of a lost land,
drawing maps of a coastline that erodes.
I am the last speaker of a dying clan,
telling stories to the wind, in a language it no longer knows.