Mother Tongue of the Father and Other Poems
by Deidre Braley
Vase with Daisies and Anemone, Vincent van Gogh, 1887
MOTHER TONGUE OF THE FATHER
What is God’s mother tongue?
I wondered
on the day I discovered
that he doesn’t play favorites
but that he hears the diatribes
of all my earthen brethren,
that he can decipher the pleas
of all the nations—
a linguistical genius
attuned to the pathos he plucked
from the cosmos.
Before the advent of
Swahili or the mouthful of Mandarin,
what phonemes were pushed from his lips
that ordered the sun
and the stars?
And what did it sound like
when he commanded the cosmos
into line with the utterance
of tongues yet untold?
I have never heard
the timbre of God’s voice and yet,
I know the language,
implanted there
in the membranes of my mind
long before I knew Dada
in harsh plain English.
I hear his mother tongue
in the place below my sternum
which aches at the assault
of his dust-turned-people
and grieves the fallen sparrow
in its fragrant shroud
of roadside flowers.
I understand him in
impressions, as he sweeps
his hands before my eyes
to show me ephemeral secrets
amidst the humdrum hum
of mundane crumb.
He speaks in sensation and
sunlight and Spirit, a
barely-audible dialect that
has fallen into disuse
and yet—
if we listen carefully still,
we might be surprised to find
that we are bilingual beings
wired to interpret the
mother tongue of the Father and that,
like the summoning of a scent from
our yesteryears, we can be
transported back
back to the beginning
back to the Garden
back to fluency
in the phonemes of our Father.
The mother tongue is not a language
to be learned but an instinct
to be heard; it is our native voice—
just another dialect, gone dormant.
FIRST INTENTIONS
I haven’t got anywhere
to lay
these horrors,
I think,
a frantic animal
with eyes that
roll and a mouth
frothed white
with fear.
So I run to the
grasses, catapult
myself into the
hidden rustlings
and spread my limbs
for every square inch
to be kissed by the
feverfew and cricket
legs and even
the humble movements
of creeping crawlies in the
somber black earth.
I do not come here to hide from
my humanity, I think—only to
remember the way that God
first intended it
to be.
DEIDRE BRALEY
Deidre Braley is a freelance writer and editor. She lives in Maine with her husband and three children, and most days can be found savoring an overly cheesy bagel or drinking a second cup of coffee while working on her weekly column, The Second Cup. Her poetry has been featured in The Way Back To Ourselves literary journal and Maine Women Magazine, and her essays have appeared in Aletheia Today, The Joyful Life, and The Truly Co., where she serves as the editorial content director. Deidre is a strong believer in the power of poetry, picking roadside flowers, and skipping the small talk. You can find her on Instagram @deidrebraley.