Mother Tongue
by Devreaux Baker
My mother whispered speak your Mother Tongue
meaning outside the house, meaning in the bus or on the street.
But I was six and did not know what a Mother Tongue meant
beyond the separate words mother meaning light, food, love, and song,
clouding the kitchen windows of our house and the word tongue meaning
whistle I carry in my mouth, meaning probe the backsides of teeth,
meaning taste sumac and cumin, coriander and cinnamon in my sleep.
What is my Mother Tongue I asked at night when she tucked me
into bed, when the candles went out, when the streets grew quiet
with fractured sleep. Mother Tongue is the smell of sugar cane
when we cut it on stumps of trees, Mother Tongue is the lightning in the sky
that falls out of the belly of heaven and tries to swim in the sea.
Mother Tongue is the long curving road our bare feet take us from ancestor voices
into footprints night leaves on the backside of day. This is the wind
moving into morning’s shoulder blade, the rise of breath moving from the ankle bones
up through the legs. This is what you slip like ripe persimmons into the pocket of your coat
until you have returned home, until you have safely passed through one more day in a strange
new land. When you are a man, you will have two languages to unfurl;
the sweet thwack of sugar cane being cut on the stump of a tree and the long straight words
from living in a land that is not your heart but that you have learned to call your home.
Your Mother Tongue is the shhh shhhh spirit sound that wraps her voice in a veil and lives at the
base of your collar bones just above your heart. Your Mother Tongue is there to guide you
to some distant place you must go that only she knows so when the stars fold up their pointed
tents and slip away from the sky she will be waiting to guide you like a light back into
the soul of yourself once more.
Devreaux Baker is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Mendocino County. Her published books include Blue Requiem, Hungry Ghosts, out of the bones of earth, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight, Light at the Edge, and Red Willow People, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award. She is the editor-in-chief of Spirit of Place: Mendocino County Women Poet's Anthology. Her national and international honors include three Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prizes, a Willie Morris Award for Poetry, the Steve Kowit International Poetry Award, a Fischer International Poetry Award, a Hawaii Council on Humanities International Poetry Prize, a U.S. Poets in Mexico Prize, a Women's Global Leadership Poetry Award, and a California Arts Council Poetry Award. She is a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Hawthornden Castle, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She currently directs the Mendocino Open Mic Poetry Series and works with the Living Lands Trust to create poetry that represents the land.