This language that you speak-

I speak it too.

You thought I wouldn’t recognize

the signs: the odd curve

of your mouth around those words-

holding onto something

it can't quite chew.

But I saw the words fester

as snakes in your throat

the syllables; little teeth, leaving marks

as they slither out.

The phrases

a thousand years old

yet you know them so well.

We were holding hands when

they were passed to us- don't you remember?

The grammar

taught to you in the womb-

feed to you through the placenta

as your spine was unfolding.

This language that we speak-

we learned in no school.

Taught

pressed into skin

like pencil across paper

preached

into bone marrow

on Sundays.

So Cronus took his sickle

and marred the Earth

and was forever branded Titan

for it

but amongst cornflowers grew

thistle

and the harvest did not fail that year

or the one after.

And Zeus reached out and tore

thunder from the sky, but

it did not burn his palms

and he

soiled his fathers face

and shattered the marble

statues, yet

forming again from the ashes and dirt-

brittle and fair.

Thus Man took the temples and the cities

and tore them down, and from the

rubble, they pried

with bleeding hands

Glass and Metal

and built their own fortresses

and shaped the winds and storms that would

havoc their bodies-

stronger with the tide.