The Literary Review

Yes it can be a relief to hear your language rising

from calamitous foreign streets,

words emerging from the din

that take you home for the moment

to your own cluttered streets and jabbering crowds.

A market place is particularly alien and remote:

odd looking fruits and vegetables, pungent smells,

arrays of cloth that sweep across your hand,

and pots and pots you can hear clang together

even as they sit silently beside each other.

And there’s the people so unlike yourself

crushing you until you’re one of their number,

nose to beard with seductive and repellant skin and sweat.

And then you hear those voices,

close, and speaking words you understand.

You see a couple, man and woman

squeezing through the multitudes.

“Just like Times Square,” says the man.

Relief takes back your face.

You’re not so far from home after all.

They could be from Milwaukee or Texas –

it doesn’t matter.

Their accent would sound extraneous

in your cold New England cloister.

But here, you’re ready to embrace these strangers

like they’re long lost friends,

with bubbling lips, grateful eyes

and arms wide enough to hug and form a phalanx

against the unfamiliar hordes.

But then there’s their own wall of intimacy to consider.

You know so well the glare of unwanted attentions,

its slippage into embarrassment.

Your discomfort in a strange land

is nothing to the primacy of another’s privacy

in places home and abroad

where everyone but themselves is foreign.

You look and listen in such anguish.

They speak English sure enough

but exclusively, not inclusively.