September 2019
Note: My mother and my aunt Lucy, best friends and sisters-in-law shared a September 3rd birthday. Everything I know about colorful, but not profane, language, I learned from them. "Mother Tongue” is for them.
Mother Tongue
My mother tongue
unrolls along the red dirt plain:
slow, tacky,
unfolding like the dream
that catches everything.
My red mother tongue
unrolls in rows of cotton,
alfalfa, fields of wheat,
and in the green water
of the silty river.
And in the back yard
on a summer’s night, in grass
thick with chiggers,
red ants, stickers.
My slick mother tongue
switches legs for talking ugly,
pitching a fit, throwing a hissy.
My slick red sticky mother tongue
can lick any little pistol,
and keeps the ring-tailed tooters
toeing the line.
-first collected in Deep Red, Event Horizon, 1993
Mother Tongue
My mother tongue
unrolls along the red dirt plain:
slow, tacky,
unfolding like the dream
that catches everything.
My red mother tongue
unrolls in rows of cotton,
alfalfa, fields of wheat,
and in the green water
of the silty river.
And in the back yard
on a summer’s night, in grass
thick with chiggers,
red ants, stickers.
My slick mother tongue
switches legs for talking ugly,
pitching a fit, throwing a hissy.
My slick red sticky mother tongue
can lick any little pistol,
and keeps the ring-tailed tooters
toeing the line.
-first collected in Deep Red, Event Horizon, 1993
© 2019 Donna Hilbert
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