Oral Tradition

My mother mutters over dishes clinking in the kitchen

In eloquent elegance of interlocking iambic ideation

Spooling sounds of syllables into subtle symphonies

Breathing brilliance into bubbles broiling beneath

A staccato strophe, repeated on rolls and reams

Of sore and sorrow-saturated skin beginning to sag

Etched in edges whose eternal ends enclosed me

Passing and pressing perfections in pentameter

Linguistic legacy without literacy, long lost but beloved

Odes entirely oratory outlasting the death of a dialect

The hallows of a history hidden in hope of handing

Proud poetic prowess of patriarchs, whose power

Crashed and was crushed by colonizers’ conquest

Reduced residues of rhymes recited to me as rubble

Endowment of epics eradicated, eviscerated by English

Lords who illegalized this lyrical language now lost

But breathing. Brittle bits of beauty bequeathed

To me, the mumbling mutterer mimicking my mother

Preserving poetry imperfectly, paraphrasing

The tangled, untranslated tendrils of tediously twisted

Sounds unspooling in a streaming slide of syllables

In eloquent elegance of interlocking iambic ideation

My mother mutters over dishes clinking in the kitchen.