Butchered Tongue

As a child, it was the place-names

Singing at me as the first thing

How the mouth must be employed

In every corner of itself

To say "Apalachicola"

Or "Hushpuckena" like "Gweebarra"

A promise softly sung of somewhere else

And as a young man

Blessed to pass so many road signs

And have my foreign ear made fresh again on each unlikely sound

But feel at home hearing a music that few still understand

A butchered tongue still singing here above the ground

The ears were chopped from young men

If the pitch-cap didn't kill them

They are buried without scalp

In the shattered bedrock of our home

You may never know your fortune

Until the distance has been shown between what is lost forever

And what can still be known

So far from home to have a stranger call you 'darling'

And have your guarded heart be lifted like a child up by the hand

In some town that just means 'home' to them

With no translator left to sound

A butchered tongue still singing here above the ground