LOST IN TRANSLATION

Once, words familiar as heartbeats

used to flow from my tongue

as easily as the blood

moved around my body.

My poems were written on the page

of my native land

with the ink of rivers

in the calligraphy of clouds.

Over here, things have become foreign to me,

now I don’t know their names;

I fall down the gap cracking open

between the things itself and the word for it.

My mouth has become

the librarian of a new vocabulary,

waiting while my brain

fetches the correct phrase,

and the frail butterfly

of meaning

which cannot be said

is conveyed only in the pauses.

I cannot find the word “Love” in my dictionary,

and “Home” gets lost in translation.