People Are a Foreign Tongue
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.