Mother Tongue by Rana Tahir
Associate poetry editor Heath Joseph Wooten on our latest bonus content: Rana Tahir’s “Mother Tongue” is suffused with careful imagery that transforms its tenderness into bowls of bread and bouquets of herbs. Through its graceful linework and momentum, food becomes the connective tissue when faced with the barrier of language, such a small morning becomes a quietly intoned declaration of love.
Mother Tongue
for my grandmother Aziza
All morning I thought of you
feeding me watermelon jam or bread
ripped apart and mixed
in a bowl with tea and milk
which you called chai and haleeb.
This is all I will think about today
the words, the way names sound
on your tongue, all that mint, thyme, and saffron,
the way warda blooms from your throat,
the way you could only say three words in English,
and I less than that in Urdu.
How quickly this tongue became foreign to me!
As pani turned to mai and mai turned to water and I
turned over the sounds, lowered my tongue,
rolling it over to you on the phone, I love you.
Kese ap? I love you.
Rana Tahir is a poet and author. Her next Choose Your Own Adventure book based on the hit Netflix show Stranger Things is available for pre-order.
