Tongue of the Empire

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

English did not arrive
as a god or ghost,
but as a suitcase—
unlatched in the middle of a dirt road
still damp from monsoon.

Inside:
a cracked Reader’s Digest,
a transistor radio humming
with vowels shaped like fists,
a lesson plan marked Civilizing Mission,
a crucifix whose face had turned
Anglo and unfamiliar.

We stood barefoot
on the schoolyard gravel,
our mouths learning
to twist around
th and v,
as if our own teeth
were too wild to understand
the elegance
of empire.

In the margins of notebooks,
we drew mango trees
but wrote “apple.”
We said “snow”
though the sun
burned the backs of our necks
raw as old tobacco leaves.

Our teachers
sounded like radios,
their grammar a hymnbook
too clean for the mud
on our calves.
They taught us to spell
"development" and "obedience"
in the same sentence.

Later,
we’d write poems—
in English, always—
about grandmothers
whose names we no longer knew
how to pronounce
without apologizing.

We called it power:
to publish in journals
bound for New York,
to speak in a tongue
that once called us
childlike,
illiterate,
incomplete.

But we do not write
about the river
whose name we lost
to a new map.
We do not mourn
the dialect we traded
for eloquence,
the gods we left behind
in favor of citations.

If we were honest,
we’d say English
was a pair of polished shoes
two sizes too small,
shiny enough
to impress the world—
but never enough
to let us run
the way our names
once let us
fly.

Still, we write.
Because even now—
with a dictionary in one hand
and grief in the other—
we are trying
to remember
what it was like
to speak
without translation.