To birth our first tongue
we plunge into the music
of those who speak to us
and around us, cradle
to kitchen table, make sense
out of our nonsense replies
to their words, fine-tune
our ear and mind with chatter,
books and blackboard lessons,
live the language in landscapes
of playground, city, country
and nature, till world and words
become our own music
without our thinking of it
To earn a second language needs
more than paper learning
from dictionary and grammar book,
which can only give us
Mae’r haul yn disgleirio,
‘The sun is shining’,
Not Mae’r haul yn gwenu,
‘The sun is smiling’,
the native speaker’s lifetime
of intimate rhythms
in landscape and breath
Harder still to express two worlds
of adoption and heritage
in picture or story when the words
and melody of one are lost,
or fragmented, or withheld,
snatches, glimpses, hints only
to help us reconstruct
Ngawak walang, back-stone,
from the phrase itself, not
from the lived learning
of landscape and speaker—
back of the stone, behind the stone,
a stone to rest the back
Leaving us the only burden:
to make sense of more than
stolen histories, faded music
by quickening with tools
of haunted eye, ear and mind
a death-right anthem that rouses
and haloes all our worlds