Számok és Nevek
(Numbers and Names)
Can I still count to ten
or twenty
in that, my lost language,
with the words I used only as coins,
for bartering?
They’re escaping like socks from
the laundry,
misplaced
in the back of drawers.
Loose change
from a left-over currency.
Words like socks – how wrong
to imagine I was ever so comfortable
in them.
My tongue never slipping around
the “good evenings”
“sweet dreams.”
My feet never flat on the
ground cobbled roughly with vowels.
I walked through the land
a mute
with a sock-full of coins
to drop in the hands of clerks,
flower-sellers.
a number to name,
a tongue that remembers the commonplace shape
of good morning -
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